Patent Law

Suppression

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

Hal "The Snoop" Wegner: "The PTO has systematically suppressed access to its internal decisions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that access to petitions decisions would reveal widespread practice violations by Examiners, sometimes upheld by Technology Center Directors as well. [There is a] PTO burial of key information amongst tens of thousands of at best difficult to access petitions decisions, as well as a cover-up of PTO delay in reaching decisions on petitions in patent (as opposed to trademark) matters."

The USPTO has locked up its web site, making it impossible to search. Professor Crouch: "The BPAI opinions are stored on the site http://des.uspto.gov. Unfortunately that site is not crawled by web indexes such as Google or Yahoo. The problem is that the site includes a "robots.txt" file that excludes such activity. See http://des.uspto.gov/robots.txt. Robots are also blocked from crawling the USPTO patent database (http://patft.uspto.gov/robots.txt) and the PAIR site (http://portal.uspto.gov/robots.txt)."

Wegner:

For FY2008 there were over 51,000 decisions on petition including over 1000 decisions on petitions under 37 CFR § 1.182 which often include highly unusual situations that are deserving of public scrutiny. Very few of these petitions have been made accessible to the public. The statistical information reported here is buried in the PTO Annual Report at p. 140.

Delayed Decisions on Petitions: Anecdotal evidence suggests that the PTO is often far too slow in answering petitions in patent matters. This evidence is buttressed by the failure of the PTO to publish information about just how many petitions have gone undecided in patent matters, while it has published such information for trademark matters.

The USPTO 2008 Performance and Accountability Report has on its cover: "accountability" and "transparency." People advertise what they are not.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on November 27, 2008 (boomark / email).