[E-trademarks] Premature end of file?

[Tragesser, Joel]

I have encountered this error multiple times in the last few weeks.

And after waiting a few hours, I just recreated the form from the saved .OBJ file and was then able to email the link.



From: E-trademarks <e-trademarks-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> On Behalf Of Carl Oppedahl via E-trademarks
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2025 10:25 AM
To: for trademark practitioners <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com>
Subject: [E-trademarks] Premature end of file?


Hello listmates.  Seems to me that this has already been discussed but I can't find it.

I am trying to respond to an Office Action in TEAS.  This is the usual long and detailed kind of response that you would never want to have to do twice.

  *   detailed editing of the good and services
  *   fiddling with entity information
  *   entering a dozen fields of information to add myself as attorney

I laboriously arrive at the "send the email to myself" thing so that I can then forward it to the foreign instructing counsel for review.  I click "send" and what I see next is:

Application Exceptions
Error on line -1: Premature end of file.
Reference Id: USPTO/ROA-2601:nnn:8200:eff:5de8:nnnn:5c6b:ba3-20250228100935630672-79396649-8906c69dnnnnnn3d6c52b2dbc9073d11f976e1ee9480e9c015ececee754fab3d83

A first comment here is that I think of this error message as a value subtractor.  It just uses up electrons and wastes the time of the reader.  Nothing in this error message does any of the normal things that we would wish for an error message to do:

  *   it is absolutely silent on what exactly went wrong
  *   It says nothing whatsover about what the filer supposedly did wrong, or what the filer would need to have done differently to get things to work
  *   It gives no hint as to what the filer ought to do next

I fear that I will end up having to do all of my laborious work all over again.  It will suck up at least twenty minutes of my time, and doing the work all over again introduces the risk of mistakes getting introduced into the situation.

And yes, I dropped an email to "teas at uspto.gov"<mailto:teas at uspto.gov>.
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