The Patent Center listserv is a group of over four hundred users of the USPTO’s Patent Center system. Many are registered patent practitioners, and others are paralegals, secretaries, and legal assistants. What the members have in common is that they all use the USPTO’s Patent Center system, and they all wish that the Patent Center system could some day be good enough to serve as a production system, permitting the retirement of PAIR and EFS-Web.
The listserv was founded in January 2020, in response to ongoing failure of the USPTO to pay attention to bugs and missing features in the USPTO’s Patent Center system. The listserv is a very active community — for example in September of 2023, there were 385 postings to the listserv.
To join the listserv, click here.
The listserv maintains a list of Patent Center bugs, a list of Patent Center feature requests, and a list of good things about Patent Center.
The USPTO has gone out of its way to avoid acknowledging the bug list and the feature request list, and the USPTO has a very poor track record at responding to these lists or fixing the bugs. As of October of 2023, there are twenty-two Patent Center bugs that date from the year 2020 and that the USPTO has neither acknowledged nor fixed. As of October of 2023, there are fifty-four outstanding Patent Center feature requests, none of which have been acknowledged or implemented. Thirty-eight of the outstanding feature requests date from the year 2020.
Members of the listserv have tried again and again to draw the attention of USPTO leadership to these bugs and feature requests. These efforts include:
- A paper letter that Seventy-Four Members of the Patent Center Listserv sent to the Commissioner for Patents, Drew Hirshfeld, about Patent Center on December 16, 2021. He never replied to that letter.
- An email message that the Patent Center Listserv sent to the Director of the USPTO, Kathi Vidal, about Patent Center on June 9, 2023. She never answered that email.
- An email message that the Patent Center Listserv sent to the Assistant Commissioner for Patents about Patent Center on July 11, 2023. He has not answered that email.
- An email message that the Patent Center Listserv sent to the Commissioner for Patents, Vaishali Udupa, about Patent Center on July 25, 2023. She has not answered that email.
- A paper letter that One Hundred Seventy-Eight Members of the Patent Center Listserv sent to the Director of the USPTO, Kathi Vidal, about Patent Center on September 29, 2023. She has not replied to that letter.
- An email message that the Patent Center Listserv sent to the Commissioner for Patents, Vaishali Udupa, on September 30, 2023. She has not answered that email.
- An Offer of Compromise that the Patent Center Listserv sent to the Director of the USPTO, Kathi Vidal, on September 30, 2023.
Members of the Patent Center listserv were among the volunteers who participated in USPTO’s alpha test of Patent Center in 2018 and 2019. Regrettably, many of the bugs reported by the alpha testers in 2018 and 2019 remain unfixed in 2023. Regrettably, not one of the feature requests requested by the alpha testers in 2018 and 2019 has been implemented even now in 2023.
The USPTO’s failure to respond to bug reports by members of the Patent Center listserv extends to failure to handle at least fifteen trouble tickets that listserv members opened with the USPTO’s Electronic Business Center (see list). Three of the trouble tickets date from the year 2020. The Electronic Business Center has, apparently, closed each of the fifteen trouble tickets without extending the courtesy to the user of letting the user know that the EBC closed the ticket. The Electronic Business Center has, apparently, closed each of the fifteen trouble tickets without actually fixing the bug that was reported.