By Christopher P. Singer --
The U.S. Patent Office today announced that a limited
group of Private PAIR users have been given the option of receiving electronic
correspondence from the USPTO instead of paper mailings. The December 19, 2006 notice discusses an
overview of the program and says that depending on its success, it could be
opened to all Private PAIR users (that is, registered practitioners with a
customer number and access to Private PAIR) as early as June 2007.
The pilot program will not include correspondence from certain Office departments, including the Office of Initial Patent Examination, Petitions, PCT, Appeals, Publications, Interference, and Reexamination. Once the program is in full effect, the PTO anticipates that a practitioner will sign up for the program and be able to associate from one to three e-mail addresses for notification purposes. Once a practitioner opts into the program, the system will send a message to each e-mail address the practitioner lists, which will detail any Office correspondence generated within the past 24 hours for any patent or patent application associated with the customer number.
For further details regarding this program, please refer to the notice, linked above.
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