Yes, Patent Center Really is that Bad

By Michael Borella --

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.

Comments

[Anonymou Practioner]

The entire thing has been a disaster. Sometimes Patent Center does not acknowledge you as the attorney on a case and refuses to even let you file document to existing cases. It thinks you are a general public user looking at the case file. The errors are legion and they invent new ones every few months. EFS was bad enough with its font demands for PDFs. This is far worse. Sometimes I paper file just to avoid Patent Center.

[Frustrated Users]

It is shameful how bad Patent Center is. I have had to fax file more for the first time in years (and then wait a month for the filing to show up in the IFW) And it’s just so many idiotic small errors that really add up. A person favorite: looking at a PCT parent from a US app’s priority tab disallows you from navigating back to the US app!

A real stain on the Vidal years.

[Connor]

Thank you for posting about this. It is very frustrating to have Patent Center be so flawed and time consuming and yet the PTO is only ever boasting about this or that Potemkin initiative and does not acknowledge problems with core functions including Patent Center, assignments, and docx, let alone address them.

[Dan Feigelson]

Thanks for calling attention to this. It's sexier to discuss matters of substantive law (or even procedural matters before the PTAB as those develop through caselaw), but the nuts-and-bolts of getting things filed make a big difference.

One colleague has taken to referring to "Patent Crapper" rather than Patent Center, and I now use that term as well. It's that bad.

And as a going away present, Kathi Vidal has made sure that they're going to make the IT for the TM side FUBAR as well next month.

My personal favorite: there's one screen where it asks if you want to upload a document from a mobile device. Because, you know, we all write patent applications on our phones. God forbid the cretins doing the programming for the USPTO communicate with actual end users.

Before they killed EFS and PAIR in 2023, I wrote a few criticisms of Patent Crapper here:

https://www.iliplaw.com/americaisrael_patent_law/2023/11/uspto-most-definitely-public-sector-which-really-really-sucks.html

and here:

https://www.iliplaw.com/americaisrael_patent_law/2023/11/is-kamala-harris-working-on-the-usptos-it-systems.html

[James Naismith]

Misery loves company. The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) introduced a new patent IT system, MyCIPO Patents, on July 17, 2024. MyCIPO Patents is similarly a mess! For 4 months, no Canadian patents were issued. Notices of Allowance have not been sent for over 5 months. Users continue to experience unexpected logouts 5 months after the system's launch. The most concerning issue is a 4-month backlog in processing of correspondence. As a result, several applications have been marked as abandoned, despite timely actions having been taken, due to the processing delay.

[M-Dizzle]

Nailed it.

[James Demers]

My favorite is getting a pdf form rejected for having a font the PTO doesn't like ... when submitting an official PTO form.

[Extraneous Attorney]

There seems to be a worldwide trend among national patent offices to push costs -- and a lot of accompanying misery -- onto applicants.

In France, a new patent IT system was forced onto everyone in late 2018. The system accepted only DOCX patent applications -- actually, you *could* file in PDF, but you had to hand in a DOCX later anyway -- except for patent applications for inventions relevant to national security, which still had to be filed on paper (*).

Of course, at first the system didn't work at all, and then patent attorneys wasted enormous amounts of time figuring out how to mold their DOCX files so that the system wouldn't puke on them. Now, it works decently well, but patent filings are sluggish every December -- rumor has it that the DOCX processing actually isn't performed on a French patent office server, but on a remote WIPO server. What's more, from time to time we get office actions pointing out trivial administrative informalities, which exist only because of the software.

On top of that, the French patent office was put in charge of managing a national online company register, and the transition went... just as well as you can expect.

(*) The "no paper filings except for national security" requirement was actually struck down, because guess what, 1) it was illegal as offending Article 5(1)a) of the Patent Law Treaty (PLT), and 2) the French patent office certainly knew but didn't care. It just took four years and a famous lawyer spending his own money to get the necessary top court ruling. And to add insult to injury, the French patent office then took almost a year to issue new regulations, but the new regulations basically say "ok, you can file your applications on paper, but we won't allow you to file one more paper than the PLT literally requires."...

[EG]

Maybe Patent Center should be added to DOGE’s growing list of what needs to be fixed (LOL).

[Greg DeLassus]

"The USPTO has... shut[] down access to assignment data in Patent Center, forcing the public to use its unreliable patent assignment search portal instead."

"Unreliable" is the right word. The assignment search portal *will not* show recorded assignments for provisionals, even if the provisional is publicly accessible on Patent Center. Of course, it is quite common (even if not "best practice") for a patent owner to record an assignment in the priority filing and not in the subsequent filings in the same family, and the recorded assignment of the priority filing would be enough to put the world on notice that the subsequent filings belong also to the recorded assignee.

Back in the days of private PAIR (and the earlier days of Patent Center) you could see the recorded assignment of the provisional in the "assignments" tab. Now all information about ownership of the provisional is simply invisible. What is the point of having an assignment recordation office in which the public cannot look up the single *most* relevant assignment in the chain of title?