USPTO IT employees and vendors are currently in Musk-Ludicrous mode – “working around the clock to restore the PALM database.”
The Patent Application Locating and Monitoring database (PALM) is the primary USPTO tool for tracking patent prosecution progress. PALM data supports many other USPTO systems used for filing, searching, and paying patent fees. At approximately 4:30 a.m. ET on August 15, 2018, PALM experienced an issue during maintenance that impacted its ability to function properly. PALM was taken offline to fix the issue. Because PALM is interconnected with other USPTO systems, the functionality of these systems was also affected. Trademarks systems were not affected.
The PTO’s current best estimate is that service will be restored sometime on Tuesday August 21, 2018.
The PTO has announced that it will refund the extra fees paid due to paper filing. However, system failures will not generally provide an excuse for filing delays.
[Photo from hobvias sudoneighm].
One of the “Examining Corp”—
You sound like a typical government employee. No you don’t make as much as we do. You work about 1/2 as hard as we do and you did about 1/2 as well as we did in school and in jobs. The PTO has a very high retention rate. Attorneys doing prosecution in private practice have a low retention rate and are constantly fired.
Our job is much, much harder than yours and overall we are much smarter and harder working than you. I know many attorneys that left private practice and work at the PTO. They say it is a cake walk. No you don’t get paid much but the work is steady and isn’t very hard. I know the PTO very well. I go and have lunch there sometimes with old friends who used to work at some of the best law firms in the country but decided it was way too hard. (And it is.) And I grew-up not far from the PTO.
You are like all those government employees that overrate how hard they work and overrate their own skill set. I grew-up in DC and the government worker mindset very well. Many relatives that are lifers for the federal government. All of you think that you are worth just so much more and if only you weren’t working for the government, why you’d be a CEO or Nobel Laureate. The fact is you are just a bunch of average joes and janes that don’t work very hard and get a decent wage. Nothing wrong with that, but pretending you are something else is ridiculous.
And anyone that doesn’t have their head up their a$$ knows what I wrote is correct. And let’s not forget that you have a union. Or that examiners regularly take a month off. I don’t think I have ever known an attorney at one of the top firms take a whole month off. Or that many of you go to work and leave at 3:30 to pick up kids and that is it for the day.
Etc. You don’t work that hard. You aren’t that smart or skilled. Get 10,000 of you together and you can make each other believe that you are poor overworked geniuses that deserve much more. What a joke.
The biggest difference between our jobs is that we are paid by corporations that constantly try to squeeze more out of us and pay us less. The average application now is maybe $10k (and probably less for many clients) when 10 years ago it was more like $14k. That is a fairly conservative estimate. Some apps have gone down to $6k and 10 years ago you could still get $18K for an app.
You work for the government and when you need more money you jack up our fees which puts more pressure on our pay.
In fact, it is getting hard to find people that want to be patent attorneys for good reason. The work is up from 10 years ago and the pay is down. And all indications are that it is going to get worse for two reasons: 1) corporations are gaining more and more power and thus have more leverage over us; and 2) patents continue to weaken and are seen as almost junk at this point. Corporations are saying we don’t really want to pay for this junk and maybe we should cut back budgets.
So please government worker don’t whine to me.
I currently work for the USPTO as an examiner and I can tell you that the 6 hours of other time will not help one bit. This new system, which was installed last fall, has been problematic up until today. This is the first time it has affected the public but it routinely causes problems for examiners. When it was first installed I personally was on the phone with OCIO literally 2 to 3 times a week for 3 or 4 months.
Believe it or not it hurts us when it hurts you. Taking care of us means also taking care of the examiners.
The high-quality prosecution shops want better prosecution.
One of the great l ie s of the anti-patent group is that we like easy allowances. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The higher quality shops don’t want random or easy allowances. That favors the hack shops and doesn’t give us any value add. It actually hurts us to have examiners give out allowances that aren’t merited.
But the anti-patent group has spent a lot of time generating propaganda.
Hear, hear.
The absolute worst-case scenario, for everyone, is a patent that gets allowed and later invalidated on newly discovered prior art that the examiner missed (but should have found).
I expect examiners to put every application through its paces and do a rigorous search. A patent that has been examined and allowed over the ten closest prior art references is much stronger than a patent given a first-action allowance over nothing more than the IDS.
” … over nothing more than the IDS.”
Depends of course on the IDS.
THIS.
This is a statement made by many “Maximalists” here.
The truth of which is simply denied by the “anti’s.”
Yes, the move to integrate all functionality into a single program has been . . . problematic. I was about to switch from OACS to PE2E/OC when OC went down for several days (several months back). It was . . . not confidence inspiring. I read somewhere that you can lose up to 30% efficiency by switching tasks midstream, and that is what much of the new technology has forced us to do – switch tasks midstream while the various applications go on and off line randomly.
It’s working again.
Not entirely — issue fees are missing.
And it’s down again.
Yes, it was down overnight intentionally to finish the repairs. It’s back up now.
A national embarrassment that the U.S. government agency responsible for patenting tech is as backward as Albania in Web technology.
Sorry Albania, that was mean.
I think you meant Elbonia, anyway.
(channeling the PHB)
I think you mean Elbonia.
I see one bright spot in this PTO mess. It has happened on the watch of the new PTO Director. He will be highly motivated to see that he does not get any more egg on his face like this again, and he has already demonstrated on other issues that he intends to be an active Director.
Here’s hoping that you are right about that, Paul. I have been very favorably impressed by Iancu so far. I will be delighted if he takes this outage as a spur to improve IT at the PTO.
Yep. Director Iancu gets a pass… this time. I expect that the importance of robust, well-designed, well-funded, well-maintained IT infrastructure is now starkly apparent.
So all of us in private practice are being hurt by this (extra fees, not getting new OAs, etc.)
What is the bet that the examining core gets some break such a cut in the production requirement? Nothing for us, though. What about a refund of the extra fees?
“The PTO has announced that it will refund the extra fees paid due to paper filing. “
You are correct that examiners are getting relief from their production requirements – a grand total of six hours for the current outage and nothing for the PALM outage of August 6. That said, I would expect an increase in the allowance rate for this time period.
While I can sympathize with the extra fees and work required by the patent bar on behalf of clients and believe no additional electronic filing should be required for a refund of fees, please do not compare your legitimate complaint to a different set of requirements and circumstances faced by examiners.
You’re whining because you have a few fewer OAs to report and bill for?
Last time I checked, most practitioners in private practice were being paid a fair bit more for their work than the most senior examiners. If you think examiners have a better deal than you do, you’re welcome to apply for a job at the PTO and leave your current position.
“Last time I checked, most practitioners in private practice were being paid a fair bit more for their work than the most senior examiners”
Curious, where does one check these matters? GS scales are readily found, but where do you get reliable information on patent private practice salaries?
Does the NALP have it?
Thanks.
The AIPLA puts out survey results.
What of the rate per cut-n-paste?
Atari Man: relative salaries are not the issue. And I’d bet that our jobs are a lot harder than examiners’ jobs and we have law degrees. We have little to no security.
But all that is not the issue. The issue is that a service that we are paying for is not being provided to us and it is costing us money.
And the point is that the government employees always seem to be taken care of and the needs of the citizens are seldom considered.
Really NW? You would be surprised how many examiners have law degrees and have been in private practice before coming to the USPTO. So speaking from experience you cannot compare private practice with examining because these are very different functions and serve different policy purposes.
Examiners, unlike other civil servants, have little security when they are under an onerous production burden that if not met results in eventual termination. Thus, as to my original post, six hours of non-production time for four-plus days of downtime in no way means examiners are “taken care of.”
Your one point that 6 hours is not going to take care of the examiners is probably true.
So in this case neither side is going to be taken care of.
The rest of what you said is for another day.
Beyond parody.
Well, at least beyond you MM.
I agree with OotEC.
How is it costing you money? Is your docket really so short that it’ll run dry because of a week’s worth of shutdown?
Ben, you are always such an @-hole. Can you really not think how this is costing my law firm money? Are you that thick?
Let’s see lots of paralegals are being paid to interact with the PTO. Now, all the procedures take longer and are different. Plus our clients have expectations for production quotas and we are right near the end of some of the fiscal years. Plus the PTO is going to make us to do things to get the fees back we had to pay for not filing electronically. Etc.
Your comments are almost always abu sive. You insult the other person by acting like they are worth nothing and their ideas are worth nothing. You act like one of those alco holics in a novel or movie that abuses people. You really are a bad actor.
For whatever little my opinion is worth, Ben, I disagree with 5.3.2.2.1 50%. I think that your posts are routinely some of the most worthwhile on this board. Evidently, however, individual milage may vary on that point.
I certainly agree with the other 50% of NW’s post, however, that once an office hires people and implements practices consistent with electronic filing, it wastes time (and therefore money) when the electronic network goes down. Work continues to pile up because new stuff comes in, but the existing product cannot go out the door. That is just as bad for those in private practice as it is for the PTO.
Done well, Examining is twice as hard as prosecution. That’s having experience on both sides.
BUT, cutting corners in examining will get you bonuses, cutting corners in prosecution will get you fired.
“Done well, Examining is twice as hard as prosecution. That’s having experience on both sides.
BUT, cutting corners in examining will get you bonuses, cutting corners in prosecution will get you fired.”
This I actually believe. I need to cut meh some corners! Get dem monies.
^^^ and that is the difference between 0 and 100 percent.
“Done well, Examining is twice as hard as prosecution. That’s having experience on both sides.”
Speaking as one who also has experience on both sides, I can tell you don’t understand how to do either.
Impressive. Are you clairvoyant? Or just super full of yourself.
Examining is an open-ended task. Examiners need to satisfactorily prove a negative, that no one has ever done what the claims recite.
Yes, prosecution, done well, is not easy. But it is at least limited. You only need to (1) satisfactorily describe the invention (realizing that you can’t account for all possible future changes in the law), and then (2) show patentability over the very small set of references the examiner cites against you.
What made prosecution difficult had nothing to do with actual prosecution. Budgets, clients, time constraints, those make prosecution very difficult these days, but I was talking about the relative difficulty of the tasks in a more “abstract,” disembodied sense.
All other working conditions being equal, I would much rather do prosecution than examination. The reasons I am currently doing examination are related to outside factors not directly tied to the difficulty of the tasks.
“Examining is an open-ended task. Examiners need to satisfactorily prove a negative, that no one has ever done what the claims recite.”
and
“Yes, prosecution, done well, is not easy. But it is at least limited. You only need to (1) satisfactorily describe the invention (realizing that you can’t account for all possible future changes in the law), and then (2) show patentability over the very small set of references the examiner cites against you.”
Thank you for proving my point.
I can pretty much assure you AAA JJ, that the “proving [my] point” aspect will not be understood with your two snippets.
I am afraid that you will have to connect more dots to show why those statements prove your point.
That being said, Ex Parte’s “ but I was talking about the relative difficulty of the tasks in a more “abstract,” disembodied sense.” is equally of need for more “dots.”
In truth, the attempts to compare application processing from the Applicant’s side and the examination of the application from the Examiner’s side are attempts to compare apples and oranges. The points of “ease” and of “difficulty” are simply not directly comparable, and it is a mistake to try to make them so.
Ooh, look at me, I’m on the internet and can negatively judge other people anonymously!
Let me try:
AAA JJ, knowing nothing about you, I’d like to opine that you are terrible at your job.
Hmm, not all that satisfying. I guess different strokes for different folks.
Good day to you.
What are the odds that there will be a house cleaning in the OCIO?
(Hint: I’m thinking of a big round number.)
I can’t tell if you mean 0 or 100%.
Imo though it’ll be 0 and the reason is because the PALM and several other systems at the USPTO are sht apparently regardless of which as sholes are in which seats in the OCIO building.
Zero is a big round number
Just another example of the near total dependence of business and government on some of the most powerful, yet undependable and insecure, technology ever developed.
The USPTO’s filing systems have been a mess for almost a decade now. PAIR has basically been broken for the past six months.
The USPTO is supposed to be a public symbol of technological innovation. The fact that they cannot master 30-year old web and database technology, to keep a straightforward website operational, is simply embarrassing. It’s a good thing the general public generally doesn’t care about patents.
Actually, it’s a bad thing. The lack of outrage is itself outrageous.
Where’s the like button?
I do not feel confident that PALM will be back up tomorrow but I am ready to be surprised.
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