5 technology features I love about USPTO, and 4 ideas for improvement

The USPTO has made significant progress in its e-government initiative, including several key additions and improvements during 2004. Overall, as a customer, I believe the Office is doing a fantastic job. With blind faith, I would guess that the PTO has to be one of the elite in technology enabled government agencies (which, of course, is as it should be).

But there is room for improvement.

The following is a list of my favorite “technology features” of the USPTO, followed by 4 ideas for improvement.

5 Favorite Technology Features

1. Public PAIR

The recently announced deployment of Public PAIR and the IFW system is a major milestone in the PTO’s e-government initiatives, and a major step forward for the patent process (and policy). Now, anyone with internet access can view the file history of any public application as it moves through the process and after a patent issues. Anyone. Anywhere. The best part…you can download the file history, or just selected portions of the file history. Kudos to the PTO for making the download system a dream — the product is a bookmarked .pdf that includes the documents you selected. Beautiful. I plan to write a post in the near future as to the beneficial effects I believe this will have on the patent system and policy generally. Needless to say, I think its a big deal.

2. EPAS and ETAS — Electronic filing of assignments.

A simple idea — scan an assignment, send it to the USPTO for recordal, and receive confirmation. It took awhile to make this a reality, but it is here, and it works wonderfully. I am now using this exclusively. Confirmation of receipt is sent immediately, and recordal information is typically sent within a day of filing, though I suspect this will increase as more people begin to use the system. This actually saves money, too. Because of the relative speed of the process, the associated file is handled less and a form letter is eliminated, saving the client money.

3. Searching patent assignments online

Another simple idea. Place the USPTO assignment records on the web, available to all. Again, it took awhile, but its here and its a great tool. So many times we come across patents and published applications that are not assigned on their face. To investigate in the past, a manual search of records was needed. Needless to say, this is an expensive and slow process for a small piece of information. Now, anyone with internet access can search the assignment records on the web, getting a full picture of a chain of title. And, in what is becoming typical USPTO fashion, the seach form is simple and easy to use.

4. Google-like interface for searching patents and published applications

When you don’t need an advanced search (which I don’t most of the time), the USPTO “Quick Search” is wonderful. It has an amazingly simple interface that makes it very easy to use. And to thing Google is getting $85/share….

5. The Inventor’s Resources page

The USPTO has done a great job of collecting information that is useful for inventors. I send people to this page all the time.

4 Ideas for Improvement

1. Make the patent laws, rules, and MPEP more user-friendly on the website

These resources are available on the website, even as downloadable pdf files. A document viewer and fully linked version, available on the website, would be particularly useful. One that is always up to date would be ideal.

2. RSS feeds

An RSS feed of news from the USPTO, including general announcements, federal register notices, etc., would be greatly appreciated. If the USPTO would like to take this idea to the next level, RSS feeds of newly issued patents and published applications (organized by class/subclass?) could be offered. How about a feed by Customer Number (think about it, a list of outgoing USPTO correspondence in your aggregator….).

3. Real time filing data

A website where filing data, not content, is collected and available to he public. Make it easy to search for number of filings in a particular class, subclass, from a particular state, city, etc. The trick — keep this up to date, at least every day. I would bet the data is there, it just needs to be web-enabled and made user-friendly.

4. Revise the patent document

The patent document (and the published application document) that we all know and love is not as useful as it could be. A previous PTP post lists some ideas on changing the document to make it more useful — I won’t revisit the ideas here. The general thought is that the patent document is a tip of an information iceberg, and the USPTO could make the document so much more useful to the public. Public PAIR accomplishes some of this in a seperate system, but more can be done….