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.

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 »

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?

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Now more than before we need the ability to identify at least three (3) administrators that can conduct additions and removal by domain address. Since USPTO.gov accounts are used to access secure USPTO systems, this seems a valid possibility when a specific domain is used for account names. For example, our practitioners and employees all have accounts under their firm email address so the domain is the same for everyone. ...more »

Restricting the ability of users to change the email address associated with their USPTO.gov account is not optimal. People move from company to company, firm to firm, and will need to use their business email address as their account address. It is not practical to require users to contact the Office to make a change that should be allowed electronically. The Office already requires users to change their password ...more »