Posts Tagged: "PAIR"

On Thursday, October 17, a Capitol Hill staff briefing will take place at 3:30 PM in 226 Dirksen Senate Office Building on a proposal to increase the amount of time that patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have to examine patent applications. At the briefing, Professors Michael Frakes of the Duke University School of Law and Melissa Wasserman of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law will present findings from their paper, Irrational Ignorance at the Patent Office , recently published by Vanderbilt Law Review. While the professors’ conclusions regarding increasing time spent by examiners on patent applications are seemingly innocuous, the entire paper is infected with the “bad patent” premise that has proven to be incredibly detrimental to the U.S. patent system in recent years. Branded as a work that updates prior research on patent quality produced by law professor Mark Lemley, the Frakes and Wassserman paper concludes that the costs of increasing USPTO resources for weeding out “bad patents” during the patent prosecution process are far outweighed by the costs borne by society in waiting for the courts to invalidate those patents during litigation.

To uncover and visualize underlying trends in the subject matter of patents, we analyzed four decades of data from the USPTO PAIR database, from 1977 through 2016, inclusive. Extracting the title of each granted patent or application and the date it was filed yields 493 megabytes of data, comprising 7.7 million records and 59.8 million words… The pronounced shift from blue words to orange words in the animated visualization suggests a major trend in the last 40 years away from patents related to materials and machines (as signified by words such as “compounds,” “machine,” and “valve”) and toward patents related to information (as signified by words such as “display,” “image,” and “processing”).

The IP5 is the name given to a forum of the five largest intellectual property offices in the world that was set-up to improve the efficiency of the examination process for patents worldwide. The top five Patent Offices (IP5) have recognized this internationalization phenomenon and many directives have been introduced to facilitate cooperation between the patent offices… For example, the IP5’s Common Citation Document (CCD) application now allows access of up-to-date citation data of all five patent offices.

On December 22, 2015, at approximately 7:00 pm, the USPTO experienced a catastrophic failure of electronic information systems due to what is being called a major power outage at the Office’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Could a power outage be responsible for electronic filing systems and information systems being down for nearly a week? Yes, it is certainly possible, but if you read between the lines it seems to me that the USPTO does not definitively know what happened or why. Given the importance of the USPTO electronic systems why didn’t the USPTO have real, robust, and redundant contingency plans? Why did they choose not to answer questions? The one question I specifically posed was whether the Office could confirm that no information or files were lost. I have not yet received an answer to that question.

Due to maintenance required on USPTO systems, access to Public PAIR, Private PAIR, EFS-Web and EFS-Web Contingency will be unavailable beginning 12:01 a.m. and ending at 11:59 p.m. Saturday, December 5th ET.

On October 27th, Apple will be issued a patent for a technology that analyzes a person’s travel plans to provide them with potential points of interest, laid out within U.S. Patent Application No. 20140223448, titled Dynamic Location Search Suggestions Based on Travel Itineraries. The amended first claim of this patent application will protect a method involving detecting itinerary information stored by a first application, identifying a travel destination based on the itinerary information, communicating the travel destination to a second application, storing the travel destination in a second application which is adapted to retrieve local information based on an identified geographic location, detecting the satisfaction of a triggering threshold for providing the local information, providing the local information for the travel destination in response to user interaction with the second application and in response to the threshold for the triggering event being satisfied, communicating the travel destination to a third application that retrieves local information based on an identified geographic location, providing local information of a first type through the second application at a time prior to the time of travel and providing local information of a second type through the third application at a time prior to the time of travel but after the time at which the information of a first type is provided. This innovation enables automatic updating of device application, such as weather or clock apps, in response to the detection that a user has travel plans. The file wrapper shows that this patent application did face a final rejection in March of this year for non-obviousness in light of a technology for data synchronization among widgets and the dashboard in a virtual environment.

This change to the Chrome browser system is one of which U.S. patent applicants will want to be aware because of its impacts to some of the digital resources made available by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Both EFS-Web, the USPTO’s online patent application and document submission tool, and Private PAIR, a secure portal for learning the status of a patent application, utilize Java programming script for authenticating users when they sign in to those services. The USPTO has posted guidance from Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) recommending the use of alternative browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer to access these services in the future.