It will be recalled that the Patentcenter listserv has secured an hour-long meeting with USPTO’s Chief Information Officer, Jamie Holcombe, on Thursday, March 23. This will run from 11AM to noon Eastern Time. I reported this to you in a blog article dated February 7, 2023. There are two developments about this.
A first development is rather disappointing. It was originally agreed that during the March 23 meeting we would discuss three feature requests and five bug reports. I am sorry to have taken so long to report to you that on February 8, Mr. Holcombe unilaterally removed the bug reports from being discussed during that meeting. Here is how he said it:
First things first – I’d like to tackle the Feature Requests first and at the end of our meeting – we can discuss how to better message/status the bug reports/trouble tickets.
The second development was that on March 17, 2023 the USPTO placed its new March 17 version of Patentcenter into production service.
Now you might have hoped that in this new March 17 version of Patentcenter, maybe at least one of the requested Feature Requests (of which there are now more than forty) might have gotten implemented. But as far as I can see on a quick look, not one of the Feature Requests got implemented.
You might also have hoped that in this new March 17 version of Patentcenter, maybe at least one of the then-outstanding Trouble Tickets (of which there were at that time over one hundred) might have gotten corrected. But as far as I can see on a quick look, not one of the Trouble Tickets got corrected in the March 17 release.
You might have hoped that at least this new March 17 version of Patentcenter would not make anything worse. But the real situation is that there are at least eight new Trouble Tickets because of things that are broken in the March 17 version that were not broken in the previous version of Patentcenter.
This disappointing situation with the March 17 version of Patentcenter is discussed in this blog article.
Anyway, we hope that in our Thursday meeting with CIO Holcombe, we will get to squeeze in a bit of discussion of the disappointing March 17 version of Patentcenter.
Another “feature” of the March 17 Patent Center is that it’s more resistant to data scraping (of public data). This shouldn’t be an issue except that the PTO’s alleged bulk patent examination data resource (PEDS) only provides about 25% of CURRENT data. Why is the PTO so keen on keeping public data from the public? Could it be because they prefer to sell the data to data aggregators? That is not in the public interest.
BTW, I pay an assistant in the Philippines to look up 2000 records via Patent Center per week by hand because PEDS doesn’t work.
One astonishing thing not mentioned here on the blog, but probably elsewhere, is the processing delays that the advent of Patent Center has brought on. It’s taking a couple of months to get a filing receipt when it was taking a couple of weeks before all this. And, it takes several days to weeks for an application filed via Patent Center to even “show up” in Patent Center to verify that application parts are present and accounted for. If application processing times sped up, the other foibles of Patent Center might be more forgivable, but it is quite the opposite.
Given that PAIR and EFS were so “ahead of their time,” this is really disappointing.