eCommerce Modernization Search Ideas

In the new Patent Center tool, we are going to start providing two receipts when filing patent applications. The Submission Receipt will inform users that the filing has been successfully received by the office, followed by a Payment Receipt to inform users that the payment has been successfully submitted. Vote “up” if you prefer to have both submission and payment information on the final Payment Receipt; and vote “down” ...more »

Allow law firms to optionally submit a Microsoft Word format document along with their PDF copy of the patent application filing to reduce the cost and errors associated with typesetting of patent applications.

In addition to collecting text information from applicants, the USPTO would also like to send and display patent application documents in a text format. If your application documents are provided to you in text, will that help you in future electronic filings?

When applications are filed and published pre-grant, they have paragraph numbers, and those paragraph numbers are also used during prosecution to make any amendments to the specification When the patent issues, those paragraph numbers disappear and are replaced with column/line numbers. Wouldn't it be easier for the PTO and the reviewing public to have a consistent specification appearance by simply staying with the ...more »

Perhaps a secure portal could be added through which an applicant or applicant's representative can send an examiner a password to open an encrypted file containing claim drafts or other material before an interview meeting. The portal would not burden an examiner with any messages or e-mail, but would contain only a password and would indicate the type of file that would later arrive by e-mail or file-sharing platform. ...more »

At our firm, our staff is the one that logs in on behalf of the attorney (we do the certification thing) and they do the uploading and submitting of any filings. One of the biggest complaints among the staff is having to log in as one attorney, submit their filing, and then log out/in when they have a filing for another attorney so that they can submit it under the different attorney's certificate. I feel that there ...more »

Currently when e-filing an Assignment you are only required to enter the Application #. This is a major flaw because there are instances where there was a typo in the Application # and the Assignment was uploaded to the wrong Application. The confirmation # should also be required for e-filing an Assignment to ensure accuracy. There should also be a better view of the uploaded documents, so that the documents can ...more »

Due to updated NIST guidelines, the USPTO plans to set the user inactivity timeout to 30 minutes in Patent Center. After 25 minutes of user inactivity, Patent Center will prompt you to continue with the authenticated session. If you do not confirm that that you want to continue, your session will terminate in order to protect your patent application data. In most cases, to sign back in after a timeout, you would only ...more »

Get rid of the expiration on passwords on MyUSPTO -- a good password that isn't reused across multiple platforms can be permanent. Is this solving a genuine and identifiable problem? No. Is there any conceivable way that a bad guy could get into uspto.gov and, for example, expropriate money from one of the credit cards? NO!!! The only payee is the uspto! Nobody's going to hack into a MyUSPTO account to when he/she ...more »

Eliminate the digital certificates and Entrust Java applets in favor of using modern two-factor authentication methods. Here is a good blog post explaining why. http://blog.oppedahl.com/?p=226 Another reason to get rid of the Entrust java system is that many browsers will stop supporting plugins like java that are required for the entrust system to work. For example, Chrome will disable support for the java plugin in ...more »

There needs to be a better way to get all XML data for all applications associated with a customer number. Currently outgoing correspondence xml data, customer number xml data, and app-specific xml data all have to be downloaded in order to get all relevant data for applications associated with a customer number. This data is used to auto-populate an on-the-fly docket program, whereby custom rules are applied to generate ...more »

Currently there are many variations in the placement of data (application no., file date, docket no., etc.) on a communication from the Patent Office. It would be helpful if all communications used exactly the same basic format for application data, etc. For example, the arrangement of data in a Notice of allowance is different from the arrangement of data on an Office Action. Decisions on petitions are somewhat free-form. ...more »