As noted by someone else on Patently-O, what Obama said is truly “dumb.” And for that reason, very unsettling as to what “rational” support Kappos and Company can expect from the White House.

I beg to differ. The system is OK compared to A) programs for doing and submitting taxes, B) the PCS-SAFE system, and C) court e-filing systems.

The USPTO has to balance ease of submission with protection from hackers, viruses, and ID10T errors. The simple PDF submission system with validation works well as a common ground that everyone can get to with either the USPTO software that has really poor resolution, any commercial PDF printer, or a simple scanner. The PDF system has one major hangup, the requirement for all fonts to be embedded. I believe, even though I don’t work there, that the fonts are required to ensure the PDF is not gibberish when they process it. If people could submit without embedding the font, they would get applications with symbols that showed up as boxes (we’ve all seen those), customized fonts that also aren’t readable, and fonts in odd sizes that would be poorly formatted. Remember the USPTO has to get a quality published patent out of these submissions with all of the patent formatting requirements.

The other problem the PTO has is slow servers at peak hours. But for the most part they have made submitting everything you need 24/7 possible, including accomodations for sequence listings and large tables.

My biggest recommendation for the USPTO is to accept text (TXT) applications, simply because any other document format could include viruses, but a TXT application would be a lot simpler to produce, could be easily imported into a database, would dramatically reduce bandwidth, and would completely remove optical character recognition (OCR) errors. They could add it by simply providing a application submission option for TXT files. They already accept TXT for sequence documents and tables.

Maybe a rating scale, 1-10, awful (1) to great (10), comparing the EFS system to other programs might help you quantify how bad the system is.
Program Ease of use Memory Requirements Security Help Comments
Microsoft 2 2 2 2 Oversized program clearly outsourced with mish-mosh menu system.
USPTO EFS 5 4 7 1 Hate the embed font requirement
TurboTax 7 5 3 3 Hate Taxes

Have a great Monday
Mike

This post was mentioned on Twitter by ipwatchdog: President Obama Calls US Patent Filing System “Embarrassing.” He didn’t get facts right, which itself is embarrassing. http://bit.ly/5SxEgA...

The USPTO e-systems are definitely inadequate. I tried to make that clear in the article and comments above. The Office, however, does not print the e-filing and then scan it back in. That is what they used to do, and it was not paperless at all.

The reason that patent attorneys tolerate this EFS is not because it is good; by any evaluation it is dreadful. It is, however, 1,000,000 times better than the system in place prior to March 2006.

-Gene

Gene, while significant improvements were made, you are being rather charitable in describing the Office’s IT advances. Today the Office does essentially the SAME thing electronically with identical results, while missing the whole purpose of electronic storage and retrieval. “In its infinite wisdom” the Office converts native electronic PDF files that we submit via EFS to bit map IMAGES. Your embedded text in the PDF is gone. The Office’s system does the same thing for every Office Action and BPAI decision that it originally produces as electronic text file. Have you ever tried to perform a text search on a PDF file stored in PAIR? It cannot be done. While it is true that some patent practitioners (particularly those using support staff with low computer proficiencies) print and scan their submissions, most produce the PDF directly from their native text file.

A native text PDF document having a size of 200kB is often converted by the Office into a bit-map PDF file that takes close to 5MB of memory. We were told that the PAIR system’s performance slowing necessitated banning automated search tools by the public because the PAIR server was overloaded. How much of that overload is due to retrieval and transfer bandwidths of 5MB items that should take only 200kB?

What document retrieval system designer would specify and design such a system in the 21st Century? Were there no hybrid solutions for storing images and electronic text when the requirements for the system were specified? What costs do we all incur now by having to OCR these documents and store them on our servers for our use?

The greatest losses inflicted by the inabilities to search text on this ridiculous system are (i) examiner and practitioner inefficiencies in crafting Office Actions and responses thereto, and (ii) lost treasure trove of prior art, which examiners could have used had the native electronic data been preserved. By their very interpretive nature, Office Actions, responses thereto and terms used in them provide a unique source of pointers to prior art with a built-in thesaurus for relevant terms that often do not exist in the text of the original reference document. Imagine how powerful a term search on all Office Actions and responses thereto could be!

Unfortunately, it may take years for someone at the USPTO to do anything about this “infinite wisdom” system. Until then, original text encoding of millions of documents will be lost.