Much, if not all, of the data that I use comes from the Annual Reports published by the USPTO. They are available dating back to 1993 online at:

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/annual/index.html

Good luck with your study.

-Gene

I am sorry for your frustrations, and we all understand how you feel.

First, the Inventor Help line at the USPTO is actually at the USPTO. The people who staff the Inventor Help line are retired examiners with a lot of experience. If you had some difficulty dealing with them I would try and call back another time and see if you can catch someone else answering the phone. I think most of those guys work about 1 day a week, so call back the next day and see if you can get some better information.

Another thing to consider is filing a petition with the Office of Petitions. They are the ones who handle problems that do not neatly fit into a pigeon hole. I have always found them to be helpful.

Another thing, it sounds like you might be representing yourself. If that is the case you need to realize you are at a substantial disadvantage. Patent law and procedure is extremely complex and not something an inventor can or should handle on their own.

I wish you the best of luck.

-Gene

6K: I usually don’t search the JPO file.

RA: Why?

6K: Because in EAST I have to flip through all the Japanese text just to get to the drawings at the back of the documents.

RA: Why don’t you just set EAST to go directly to the drawings?

6K: (After a pause) Because then I can’t see the Japanese text.

RA: Why would you want to see the Japanese text?

6K: (After a pause) Haven’t you checked my cases? I always find stuff in the Japanese text!

RA: Wait, I thought you said you usually don’t search the JPO file?

6K: (Responds with sarcasmlol) ….

A government employee talks to a citizen:

6K: I can’t work like this.
CI: Why?
6K: My chair’s too hard!
CI: O.K. Here’s a soft chair.
6K: Thanks. I can’t work like this.
CI: Why?
6K: My chair’s too soft.

A corporate employee talks to a supervisor:

CE: I can’t work like this.
SU: Why?
CE: My chair’s too hard!
SU: Be thankful you have a chair and get to work, or you won’t have a job.

It seems like the people most surrounded with comfort and ease devolve into the ones the least able to deal with discomfort and difficulty. In government today, there are many who would rather be served in comfort than actually work to improve things.

Like a child that when presented with facts spins and says “But I’m right because…” and then hopes no one examines his words too closely, you simply meander off point with sarcasm and hope it appears to those less “versed” in fallacy (or more honest in character) than you that you win.

All while you convince yourself that you are right and everyone else is wrong. The quintessence of government today.

To be, and not to appear, 6K – that is the lesson of life. But I suspect you are still very far from learning this.

And unfortunately, you haven’t made a single point worth responding to.

David Testardi

“f r o m e v e r y N P L t h a t i s s u b m i t t e d t o t h e P T O”

“o p t i o n a l l y, a c l a s s i f i c a t i o n t h a t a n E x a m i n e r m a y a s s i g n”

The beauty of a USPTO-LIT file is that is can be completely automated, and at the same time allow Examiner control when such control is desired.”

I should presume that the PTO would then become the world’s premier publishing service if it was nearly free for this service. And as to it being classified, we have neither the time or inclination to do so. I’m telling you that what you are proposing is a huge project, no matter how you want to spin it. Otherwise, get your bro to create it in his spare time and put it on a publicly accessible website and tell us all about it. It’ll be such a great thing that all examiners will soon be using it more than google. After that of course everyone in the entire patent field will be using it and you can make millions off of advertisement revenues after you patent this paradigmlol. And you can allow only examiners to classify things on the site if you like.

Get to it.

” having the whole patent at your viewing pleasure means nothing.”

hardly. If you really do know who I am you’d know for certain that there is plenty to be found in documents written by people in jap for the trained eye of an english only speaker to spot. More than enough to tell one whether the document is worth further review by a translator in very many instances. Bottom line, if you can’t tell anything from the jap docs cited in my actions then you’re not looking very hard, or don’t understand why I’m interested in them in the first place.

Truth is, unless you know Kanji or Katakana (one of your translators at STIC can teach you Katakana with a cheat-sheet like she taught me when I was an Examiner), having the whole patent at your viewing pleasure means nothing.

To see the whole patent of docs where the drawings are important, right click, Text Format > Full text.

G o t t h a t 6 K ?

Like you can read Kanji and Katakana (and yes, patents even have some Hiragana)?? Right !! Seems to me you have enough trouble with English sometimes, 6K! (See below.)

Truth is, unless you know Kanji or Katakana (one of your translators at STIC can teach you Katakana with a cheat-sheet like she taught me when I was an Examiner)

“And let me get this straight, you want examiners to now not only classify all the US patents in the country, but all the NPL lit in the entire world?”

Perhaps I should have said it twice as slow…

“f r o m e v e r y N P L t h a t i s s u b m i t t e d t o t h e P T O”

“o p t i o n a l l y, a c l a s s i f i c a t i o n t h a t a n E x a m i n e r m a y a s s i g n”

The beauty of a USPTO-LIT file is that is can be completely automated, and at the same time allow Examiner control when such control is desired.

That’s for PCT’s though. But in any case yes, it is worth a war, maybe 2 even if we were talking about pcts. I mean, I can include it in the search report if you guys like, and set the thing to auto flip in the background while I type the action.

I’m going to be 100% honest with you though about PCT’s. 100% of junior examiners don’t know their arses from their elbows when it comes to even filling out the forms much less the formal requirements for doing searches/restrictions.

“Are you saying you don’t know how to flip between drawing sections while viewing documents in the JPO file”

The JPO file? Idk what you’re talking about man. I know how to bring up drawings only and I know how to bring up the patent (which has drawings in the back). I was told a long time ago by the ITRP that trained us on using EAST that this was what seemed like the best way to search drawings in the JPO patents. Maybe there is a way to put the drawings first, but I and all my coworkers don’t know it. If you’d like to tell me I’ll let them know. Sure there is good art there sometimes.

“In the JPO file, right click on the drawing pane, and select something like Display Format > Drawings. Then you’ll just flip between the drawing sections of the documents when you choose Next Doc or Prev Doc. If the drawings don’t exist in a particular doc, you’ll get a message (in the drawing pane) that says something like, “Requested section not found.””

Right, so how do I view drawings and then the patent itself? Switch between modes for every maybe significant hit? May as well go to the end of each doc and look at the drawings that way.

“Do you know how to highlight just particular terms from your search strategy for KWIC?”

Yeah, why?

“Like say you were looking for an oxygen etch in some specific environment, and you just wanted to highlight [L3: oxygen near7 etch$] even though you had a ton of other words/limitations in your final query (L6). Well try [L3 not (L3 not L6)].”

That’s a nifty trick, but KWIC f’s you over enough already without highlighting just the words you’re looking for. You can’t get context for what it is that you’re looking for. It is my exp that using KWIC is just as slow as doing full view and then scrolling down to find what you’re looking for. Otherwise you end up reading the paragraph that has your words, then not knowing wtf you’re reading about, then having to switch to full view anyway. I use KWIC sometimes, but it bites you in the arse just as much as it helps you.

“When a Doc is important it should be concatenated JUST SO you can see all family members, dates, variations, etc. right there (instead of having to manually search for the family members by priority number…lol)”

Well yes, but officially we’re relying on the classification and/or the word search results to determine if that particular doc is relevant. Make no mistake Gene, the option of turning on and off concatenation would be a great feature. But I’m not getting my panties in a twist just yet.

“Yep, blame the public. I was around when the PTO updated EAST to include the pre-1971 USOCR file, and they lost all pre-1971 classification in the process. (NB: that proprietary OCR software you guys use is really special… I guess the programmers never heard of a spell checker?)”

How am I blaming the public? I asked if you’re going to be responsible when this mission critical piece of software goes belly up one day and doesn’t come back for a week? The point I’m making is that the devs have to be conscious of this little problem when upgrading.

“(when I spoke of one man-week, I was thinking of my brother).”

Well then get your bro up in this bia and let’s get er done. But he’s responsible when he puts the decimal point in the wrong place and the software that’s supposed to take fractions of pennies and aggregate returns instead generates thousands of dollars the next day. Alright?

“So a couple other things I would do to EAST are: 1) include Fterm, EPC, and European ICO classifications in EAST (since they are already provided by the JPO/EPO and they are tons better than most of the classification we have left over from the 1980s) concatenated with the EAST records, and 2) generate a text-searchable LITERATURE file from every NPL that is submitted to the PTO (OCRing the NPL and giving the NPL the classification of the PUB or PAT it is submitted in, or optionally, a classification that an Examiner may assign). Companies/publishers should be able to submit docs directly to the USPTO-LIT file (optionally, with a suggested classification) if they pay a “classification fee” (and/or a “publication fee”) to the Office (i.e., they could use it like a defensive pub). In this instance, Examiners would do the primary classification, because you want the Examiners to *learn* from the state-of-the-art literature, so they become technical experts.”

That’s like a half billion dollar operation you’re proposing right there. And let me get this straight, you want examiners to now not only classify all the US patents in the country, but all the NPL lit in the entire world? That’s what it sounds like you are proposing unless your “fee” is practically on the order of a filing fee. Sure, it’s a great idea, but it isn’t even near practical.