According to Robert Budens<\/strong><\/a>, the President of the Patent Office Professional Association, which is an independent union of professional employees formed in 1964 to represent the interests of examiners, classifiers, computer scientists, and other patent professionals who work at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, some within the Patent Office are concerned that the USPTO computer network is \u201changing on by bubble gum and bailing wire.\u201d Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the state of IT at the agency responsible for innovation! Furthermore, the current EFS system, while thousands of times better than the old EFS system, is exceptionally difficult to use by any honest, operability standards. Saving a PDF to meet the needs of the Patent Office shouldn’t be so difficult. I only half jokingly say it is faster to print an application, drive across town to the Post Office, send the application via Express Mail and return to the Office. There has to be an easier, more usable system that even patent attorneys who are set in their ways can figure out!<\/p>\nNow, there was one thing that President Obama said that was not only incorrect in reality, but demonstrates he and his speech writers are completely clueless. The President reportedly said that the print and scan approach of the Patent Office “is one of the reasons why the average processing time for a patent is roughly three years.”<\/p>\n
First, this can’t be true since the Patent Office does not print and scan applications electronically filed through EFS. Second, this statement demonstrates that the President doesn’t understand that it was the dysfunction of Patent Office circa 2005-2009 that caused an enormous backlog to grow and pendency to explode. How can it be that someone who blames President George Bush 43 for everything, even things that weren’t his fault, doesn’t blame Bush and the Dudas Patent Office for what is demonstrably and provably the fault of the Bush Administration? I almost feel like I have entered the twilight zone.\u00a0 At least the President is talking about patents, which the patent community should applaud, but if he so carelessly gets things wrong in an area I know intimately I have to wonder what else is he getting wrong in areas where I don’t have all the facts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Earlier today President Barack Obama, perhaps with the best of intentions, demonstrated that he is not all that familiar with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and how they handle patent applications. The short of it is that what President Obama said to tech executives was wrong on the facts, but at least partly correct in spirit. Essentially, President…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19234,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[228,3,187,41],"tags":[1253,1254,803,295,110,8733,40,395,8727],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8423"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8423"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=8423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}