(Update: we wrote to Commissioner for Patents Udupa about the open-or-closed status of these fifteen EBC tickets on October 12, 2023 (see email). We have sent a followup letter to the Commissioner and hopefully we will hear back from her.)
The USPTO claims to listen to users who report bugs in Patent Center. The USPTO says that one of the ways that a user can report a bug in Patent Center is to open a trouble ticket with the Electronic Business Center.
Here are fifteen EBC trouble tickets which users of Patent Center opened, reporting bugs in Patent Center. In this table, each EBC ticket number is listed along with the corresponding CP ticket number on the Patent Center trouble ticket list, and along with the date of creation of the trouble ticket.
The USPTO is disingenuous when it pretends that reporting Patent Center bugs to the EBC supposedly works. Never, not even once, has any Patent Center user who opened a trouble ticket about Patent Center with the EBC ever heard back from the EBC with any progress or resolution for the bug that was being reported. The USPTO never got back to any of these fifteen Patent Center users.
| EBC ticket number | CP ticket number | creation date |
| 1-690814254 | CP16 | May 4, 2020 |
| 1-695641646 | CP30 | June 8, 2020 |
| 1-701563481 | CP33 | July 5, 2020 |
| 1-761431662 | CP55 | June 14, 2021 |
| 1-761431662 | CP56 | June 14, 2021 |
| 1-823950504 | CP63 | October 22, 2021 |
| 1-839307926 | CP69 | December 3, 2021 |
| 1-783509075 | CP71 | December 8, 2021 |
| 1-826155667 | CP103 | March 13, 2023 |
| 1-827293068 | CP127 | March 28, 2023 |
| 1-828414131 | CP135 | March 30, 2023 |
| 1-830635911 | CP139 | May 18, 2023 |
| 1-831159389 | CP140 | May 25, 2023 |
| 1-831173674 | CP141 | May 25, 2023 |
| 1-838522518 | CP148 | August 29, 2023 |
| 1-836237428 | CP160 | September 30, 2023 |
Congratulations for you good work. As an independent inventor, no money to pay an attorney, I have often had to ask questions to the EBC, and my experience is that I receive as many different answers as I ask the same question again. They just say something. Unfortunately I have never recorded the events… But I am sure that others have the same experience as I do.
I ask to keep my name out of this, because I have experience of another kind: requesting help from the Ombudsman for more serious problems than random non-sensical answers, caused retaliation and other patent denials, which I cannot afford.