[Patentcenter] Third Party Submissions

[Carl Oppedahl]

Thank you for posting.  This turns out to be a repeat of the coding 
blunder that gave us https://patentcenter-tickets.oppedahl.com/#CP9 more 
than three years ago.

It is astonishing that the Patent Center developers would repeat this 
blunder, which they first made in April of 2020.  Back then, it took the 
developers more than six months to fix the mistake.

What's going on, of course, is that the coders failed to actually look 
at the EFS-Web code.  if they had, they could have copied over the list 
of patent offices.  Instead of using a list of /*patent offices*/, the 
coders were lazy and grabbed some public-domain list of /*countries*/.

The mistake was the the coders assumed that /*patent offices*/ are the 
same thing as /*countries*/.  Which of course they are not.

But the astonishing thing is that the realization in 2020 by the coders 
that patent offices /*are are not the same thing as */countries got 
lost.  One assumes that in a mere three years, there has been complete 
staff turnover among the coders.  One imagines that nobody on the USPTO 
team today in 2023 was even around back in 2020 when the USPTO coders 
read my blog article 
<https://blog.oppedahl.com/six-months-after-bug-report-uspto-fixes-priority-claim-to-ep-applications-in-patentcenter/> 
and realized that patent offices /*are are not the same thing as 
*/countries.

Actually the blunder is worse than what I just described.  The coders 
actually grabbed some public-domain list of /*places where you can send 
mail. */So it includes lots of places that are not even countries, but 
are mere protectorates or territories of other countries.

The magnitude of this blunder by the USPTO developers is almost without 
limit.  The drop-down list includes, for example, Wallis and Fortuna, 
which does not have a patent office.  The drop-down list includes the 
Aland Islands, which does not have a patent office.  The drop-down list 
includes the French Southern Territories, which does not have a patent 
office.  The drop-down list includes the Holy See (the Vatican), which 
does not have a patent office.

But of course the drop-down list is missing one of the biggest patent 
offices in the world, the European Patent Office.  And it is missing 
ARIPO and OAPI and the Eurasian Patent Office.

Irving, what is the EBC ticket number for this?

On 12/30/2023 6:45 AM, Irving Fishman via Patentcenter wrote:
>
> In trying to file a third party submission the blocks to fill in by 
> drop down menus include a “citation type” which gives you specific 
> selection only, one of which is “foreign patent document”.  On 
> selecting this, the next screen gives you a required drop down of 
> “Country code” however, the list does (as of December 19, 2023) not 
> include any of the regional offices (EPO, ARIPO, or OAPI, etc).  EBC 
> only advised that they could “escalate the question” and were no 
> immediate help even after advising that I was close to the deadline 
> for filing the particular third party submission.  A supervisor merely 
> shunted me over to Application Assistance Unit.  At least there, 
> people were sympathetic and went through the various screens and 
> confirmed I was right, there was no applicable country code (a 
> required field) for WO or EPO or other regional patent document, but 
> that there was nothing they could do.  I finally gambled and listed 
> the WO document under “non-patent literature” and in the citation gave 
> a statement as to why I listed the document there.
>
> Two days later I spoke to Examiner Tamai who issues the notices of 
> whether the submission is or is not compliant and he advised that he 
> would not issue a “non-compliant” notice under the circumstances 
> described. This morning (12/30/2023) I went back into the system and 
> it still does not have any listing under country codes for WO or EPO 
> or other regional office patent documents, but there is a listing for 
> “stateless” and a listing for “not provided”, which are really not 
> applicable.  You would think that in the first instance, the regional 
> offices would be in the list and that if they could add “stateless” 
> and “not provided” they could specifically added WO, EPO, and the 
> other regional offices.
>
> So when in doubt, stich your reference citation into the non-patent 
> literature group and explain.
>
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