For most of the last two decades, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office offered its electronic filing system (EFS), through which practitioners could file patent applications and related prosecution documents, and private patent application information retrieval (private PAIR), through which practitioners could view filed applications. Both were retired on November 8, 2023 in favor of Patent Center.
Patent Center existed as a "working beta" for a number of years. This alone is not an issue -- organizations launching new web portals often introduce them with a soft launch so that they can crowdsource their final debugging. However, the formal cutover to Patent Center thirteen months ago has been a disaster. And with EFS no longer being available as a backup, practitioners are forced to use a buggy, poorly-designed web application with an unintuitive interface for mission critical activities on behalf of their clients.
Patent Center defects are legion. According to one collection (which has not been updated in six months), there are 141 reported and unresolved issues with Patent Center. These range from the merely inconvenient to the highly problematic. Here, I will describe a handful of the most prevalent, irritating, and disruptive.
Ghost Sessions (the spooky side of staying logged in too long)
Like many web portals, Patent Center downloads a number of scripts to run in your browser when you access it. However, the client side of the application frequently gets out of sync with the server side. In particular, the server side may time out your session while the client side thinks that the session is still valid. This means that the Patent Center user interface will appear to be responsive and will allow you to perform a few tasks before informing you that your session has been logged out. Or just refusing to respond altogether. Any work that you have done in such a ghost session is lost and you will need to do it again.
Surprise Logouts (because productivity is overrated)
This issue may or may not be related to the ghost sessions issue. In some cases, you are progressing through a multi-part transaction with Patent Center and you will find yourself unceremoniously logged out. Your progress may or may not be lost. Most annoyingly, these surprise logouts can happen during the penultimate step of a lengthy transaction, right after you hit the "submit" button to file documents, or when paying a fee. In the latter two situations, it may be unclear whether your submission or payment actually went through.
401 Errors (you shall not pass)
This bug popped up a few months ago and is now remarkably common. I rarely go a day without getting several of these (I even received one while writing this article). If you leave a Patent Center session open in a browser tab for a while, it will eventually log you out (on both the client and the server this time) and tell you that you lack authorization to access the site. That is fine, except that once you have a tab in this state, reloading Patent Center will not work. Instead, you need to close the tab and open a new tab to get back in to Patent Center.
Progressive Slowdowns (every click feels like an eternity)
Most of us pop into Patent Center to upload and file a few documents, then log out. However, if you have the misfortune of having to stay in Patent Center for a while to make a number of filings, you will find that each transaction makes the interface a little slower. Eventually, Patent Center gets unbearably unresponsive and you will need to log out and back in to remedy the situation. In recent experience, you will notice the slowness after making about 5-10 submissions. This type of behavior is a symptom of a memory leak -- a bug in which software allocates more and more memory without releasing it properly.
And these are just a few issues. There are plenty more, such as Patent Center not accepting files with capital letters in its extension (e.g., "file.PDF"). Converting text from uppercase to lowercase is a simple activity taught in computer science 101. Apparently, the USPTO's new motto is "Innovation starts here, but not if your file name yells at us."
Further, Patent Center had a data breach earlier this year involving private assignment data being made publically available. The USPTO has "addressed" this breach by shutting down access to assignment data in Patent Center, forcing the public to use its unreliable patent assignment search portal instead.
All these issues may not seem significant to anyone which does not use Patent Center on a regular basis. But they are. These problems occur frequently and regularly. Each time you have to log back into Patent Center or reenter data, you need to spend time. As in all industries, time is money. The consequence of a defect-ridden portal in that the USPTO is pushing costs to applicants. Moreover, it is not hard to believe that a submission has been filed or that a fee has been paid when it has not. This can lead to loss of rights for applicants and penalties for practitioners.
In an ideal world, the USPTO would be open about these problems, and release a memo along the lines of "We screwed up and here is what we are doing to fix it." But that has not happened. Instead, Patent Center stands as a prime example of institutional incompetence. To be clear, it is not the job of applicants and practitioners to help the USPTO debug its own software -- we have other jobs that are demanding and often require long hours. The USPTO needs to step up.
Without an efficiently functioning web portal, the USPTO cannot achieve its mandate to protect American intellectual property rights. If we are lucky, the next USPTO director will take the necessary steps to fix the most significant Patent Center issues early in their term.
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