[Patentcenter] PTO continues to change its story on launch of IPAS (Assignment Center)

[Carl Oppedahl]

On 1/19/2024 6:04 PM, Patent Lawyer via Patentcenter wrote:
>
> When United Airlines and Continental merged, the newly merged airline 
> used Continental's reservation system (at the backend), but United 
> still used its front end.
>
> I discovered this when I booked an international flight using the 
> United online reservation system.    The reservation was given a sort 
> of "tentative" status, which lasted about a day, after which it was 
> confirmed.  I called United to find out what was going on and was told 
> that for some international flights, the reservations made on the 
> United system were being printed out and then manually entered into 
> the Continental reservation system.   I was booking with United’s 
> loyalty points (“miles”), which may have been the reason for this 
> convoluted process.
>
> (I may have it wrong as to whose system was retained, but I know they 
> printed out bookings from one reservation system and manually entered 
> them into the other.)
>
> Maybe the PTO is doing the same thing.
>
> Maybe the PTO has been taking the assignment data we enter into the 
> current (soon-to-be-legacy) system, and maybe they are manually 
> entering it into their new system.
>
> And maybe they are finding more about the NWONW (New way of not working!)
>
The idea of DOCX at the USPTO is to capture computer-readable characters 
from patent applicants, so that later the issuance of a patent can be 
done from those computer-readable characters instead of using OCR'd or 
hand-keyed information.  But old-timers among us will recall that this 
was not the USPTO's first try at this.  The first try was ePave, for 
which our firm was one of the beta-testers.  This was around maybe 1997 
or so.  Anyway, the filer would convert the to-be-filed patent 
application into XML and would eventually upload it into USPTO's ePave 
system.  The idea was that the computer-readable characters in the XML 
file could later be employed in the process of issuing the patent.

The ePave system ended up a complete failure due to limited uptake by 
users, and the USPTO eventually scrapped it.

But during the time that ePave was in service, the way that an 
ePave-filed patent application would reach an Examiner was ... you 
guessed it!  A USPTO clerk would take the XML-formatted patent 
application that had just been e-filed by the beta tester, and would 
print it out on paper.  And the paper patent application would get 
inserted into the same USPTO workflow as was used for a patent 
application that a filer had sent to the USPTO by Express Mail.  And at 
issuance time, the typesetting of the to-be-issued patent was 
accomplished by OCR and hand-keying.
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