[Patentcenter] More Patent Center unannounced degradation

[Richard Schafer]

I’ve received a private message from another listserv subscriber saying that their docketing system vendor sent the same alert, but while their vendor “thinks” they have a fix, they’re waiting to see what other changes the PTO makes in an update they said was scheduled for tonight.

Apparently the PTO’s New Way of Working means that the system is never stable, but gets changed continuously, even up to major events like shutting down the predecessor system. If that meant that bugs were continuously being fixed without introducing new problems, I might applaud that. But when those last-minute changes degrade the functionality of the system (like enforcing lowercase file extensions or prohibiting web scraping) without prior announcement, that’s just bad.

Best regards,
Richard A. Schafer | Schafer IP Law
P.O. Box 230081 | Houston, TX 77223
M: 832.283.6564 | richard at schafer-ip.com<mailto:richard at schafer-ip.com>

From: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 7, 2023 5:26 PM
To: patentcenter at oppedahl-lists.com
Subject: Re: [Patentcenter] More Patent Center unannounced degradation


Richard, you must be mistaken.  Patent Center has 100% of the functionality of PAIR.
On 11/7/2023 4:11 PM, Richard Schafer via Patentcenter wrote:
Coincidentally, I received a notice from Claimmaster Software today warning me, “Unfortunately, a fairly recent update of Patent Center appears to have been intentionally designed to prevent automated web scraping.”  Once Private PAIR shuts down they will be unable to fully automate downloading of bibliographic data and IFW documents as they could from Private PAIR and until recently, from Patent Center. The best they can do is teach me a semi-manual import tool to obtain the data for creating Office Action response shells and filling out PTO forms.

That’s yet another last-minute degradation of Patent Center. There’s no mention of this change on the Patent Center information page. Nor can I find any rule or even guidance against web scraping.

Best regards,
Richard A. Schafer | Schafer IP Law
P.O. Box 230081 | Houston, TX 77223
M: 832.283.6564 | richard at schafer-ip.com<mailto:richard at schafer-ip.com>


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