eCommerce Modernization Patent Center Beta Release

The "Search for a patent application" field on the Patent Center home page should be revised to include attorney docket number as one of the options for searching. PAIR allows for searching by attorney docket number, and it is very common for a practitioner to search by attorney docket number. Thanks.

The button that says "File another patent application" (and other prompts like that throughout Patent Center) should instead prompt the user to process another submission. Most of our submissions via EFS (and now Patent Center) are not applications but are rather documents related to existing applications. So the prompt to file another "patent application" is not correct. That was an error in EFS. It would be great... more »

Not sure why there has been a reversion to not allowing for embedded fonts in PDF documents. 🙄

Patent Center was working like a charm previously and allowed for the uploading of PDF documents that EFS-Web did not. The extra work required to make PDF documents image based when converting them from a word processing program is cumbersome and time consuming.

Please eliminate the embedded font issue... more »

Patent Center seems to not be associating the attorney docket number of a submission with a fee payment for that submission. When going from Patent Center to the fee payment page, the fee payment confirmation shows an "Attorney Docket #" column, but it's empty. This results in accounting problems for the practitioner, where the practitioner cannot readily tell from deposit account payment records what attorney docket... more »

Please look into the speed issue with Patent Center. For the past few weeks Patent Center has been performing much slower than Private PAIR (when PAIR is operating).

 

Users will be slow to accept and adopt Patent Center if users do not see improvement with speed and access.

Please ensure consistency in the way inventor names are displayed. In several records some inventor names are displayed as First Middle Last while others are listed as Last, First Middle.

 

The variation can cause inadvertent errors that cost the applicant to fix.

Currently the Applicant is not consistently listed for AIA applications in Patent Center. It would also be helpful to have the inventors listed when they have by default become the Applicant. Listing inventors when an assignee-applicant should be listed will help practitioners see when correction is needed.

In EFS, a payment "receipt" is generated by merely setting up a payment, while the fact of payment is reflected on the same receipt as the submission itself. In PatentCenter, the submission receipt does not reflect the payment. While the payment receipt is generated after the actual payment, rather than before, and contains data making it clear the payment was submitted, it is at the very least confusing to look at... more »

The drag and drop document upload feature is great as well as the automatic document type recognition. However, the current manual document type selection feature can be slow and cumbersome. For example, when loading a large under of IDS support documents such as foreign patents and non-patent literature it can take a long time to individually select their document type.

To solve this problem, there should be some way... more »

Emailed EBC about having the First Action Prediction Tab added to the Patent Center so that status letters can be requested for matters that are not yet being prosecuted.

Similar to the previously-reported issue for the deposit account payment process, the column for "Attorney Docket #" is also blank on the USPTO Monthly Statement for the patent practitioner's credit card.