Posts Tagged: "public pair"

Jamie Holcombe, Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), seemed surprised to learn on Wednesday that both the Public and Private versions of the USPTO’s Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) System have serious issues that are making workflows untenable for users.

Holcombe was participating in a public Forum on the PAIR system, where USPTO staff listened to stakeholders’ experiences since the Office implemented major security changes to the system on November 15, 2019. “The USPTO disabled the ability to look up public cases outside of a customer number using Private PAIR,” explained Shawn Lillemo, Software Product Manager at Harrity LLP, who attended the Forum. “Most patent professionals prior to the change could retrieve all the PAIR information they needed from Private PAIR. That is no longer true.”

Whether the Citron report is intentionally wrong for the purpose of causing PolarityTE stock to tumble, which it has, or whether it is recklessly wrong, or just ignorant is impossible to tell. But what Citron says can without question be characterized as absolutely incorrect… Citron says that the non-final rejection was made known to PolarityTE on March 31, 2017, which they find to be conclusive proof of fraud because PolarityTE closed a transaction with shareholders on April 7, 2017. The problem, however, is the non-final rejection was mailed by the USPTO and sent to the law firm representing PolarityTE on April 7, 2017… Citron also claims that PolarityTE has engaged in fraud because they received a final rejection from the patent examiner and did not notify shareholders. Again, only those who are completely unfamiliar with patent practice and procedure could possibly make such an erroneous claim. A final rejection is anything but final in the everyday meaning of the word.

Taking a hint from what has worked before can give patent prosecutors an advantage. The question is then how to find such examples for use in forming arguments and claim amendments to address Alice v. CLS Bank rejections…. If you happen to face an Alice v. CLS Bank rejection or are sorted into an art unit that experiences a high volume of Alice v. CLS Bank rejections, consulting the prosecution history of successful cases in Public PAIR can prove fruitful for identifying analogous claim limitations and arguments that may help stimulate your thinking in forming a successful strategy for patentability.

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.