[Patentcenter] "Patents has not implemented the digital proofing process with ID.me at USPTO."

[Carl Oppedahl]

Yes this banner has actually been there for some days.  And given that 
the single sentence appears all by itself, providing no context, it is 
gibberish.  It steals a few seconds of attention from every user of 
Patent Center by teasing you with the notion that it surely must be 
telling you something you needed to know -- and then provides no useful 
information at all.  It is actually a value subtractor.

Having said this, I will provide the context that sort of explains why 
the banner is there at all.  It turns out that the developers of Patent 
Center go out of their way to finger-point whenever they have the 
ability to blame some other part of the USPTO for defects or weaknesses 
in Patent Center.  The context here is that something like a year ago, 
on the trademark side of the USPTO, it became possible to use ID.me as a 
way of satisfying the Trademark Office that you are who you say you are 
(that you are not, for example, a person from a certain foreign country 
masquerading as a US attorney).  And I guess the ID.me digital proofing 
process is maybe less of a complete pain in the neck than whatever 
digital proofing process was previously being used.

Meanwhile on the patent side of the USPTO, the only digital proofing 
process available even now in 2025 is whatever that older process was, 
the one that was more of a pain in the neck when compared with ID.me.

And what must apparently be happening from time to time now in 2025 is 
that some would-be USPTO customer of Patent Center (paralegals, I guess) 
bangs up against the requirement that he or she prove his or her 
identity to be able to carry out some patent-related task.  And the 
would-be customer gripes (perfectly reasonably) that the proofing 
process is a complete pain in the neck.  And the would-be customer calls 
up the EBC and opens a trouble ticket which, reduced to its essence, 
says "how come if I were a trademark customer I would get to use the 
less annoying ID.me, but because I am using Patent Center, I am forced 
to use the older and more annoying system?"

And the developers of Patent Center want to make sure everybody knows 
it's not their fault.  They blame "Patents", whoever that is.

Anyway this is only the most recent in a number of finger-pointings.

Remember how it used to be that in Patent Center you used to be able to 
see a First Office Action Prediction?  (Recall that the developers of 
Patent Center had long ago promised that of course every feature of 
EFS-Web and every feature of PAIR would be brought forward into Patent 
Center -- and FOAP was a feature of PAIR.)  And then rather abuptly, the 
Patent Center developers disabled that feature in Patent Center.  The 
developers said the feature was being "temporarily" turned off, and the 
developers went out of their way to finger-point, saying that the reason 
for the turning-off of the feature was that some other department of the 
USPTO was actually responsible for doing the predicting, and that other 
department was supposedly arriving at inaccurate predictions.  So it's 
not the fault of the Patent Center developers that the FOAP feature was 
getting yanked. Finger-pointing.

On 1/13/2025 7:37 AM, Jeffrey Semprebon via Patentcenter wrote:
> This morning, upon logging into MyUSPTO, I'm greeted with the headline 
> banner
>
>     Patents has not implemented the digital proofing process with
>     ID.me at USPTO.
>
> Presumably, this conveys useful information to someone, but I find it 
> utter gibberish. Fortunately, moving on to Patent Center, PC appears 
> to be working normally.
>
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