USPTO outage: EFS restored but PAIR data ‘may not be valid’
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) yesterday said its patent systems are “operational from a filing and fee payment perspective”, a week after the agency’s PALM database went offline.
As reported by WIPR, the USPTO’s patent systems have been affected by “emergency IT maintenance” after they went offline on Wednesday, August 15.
Yesterday, a spokesperson for the USPTO told WIPR that the outage was not caused by a hack.
The maintenance relates to an issue with the agency’s PALM database, which supports systems such as the Electronic Filing System (EFS) and the Patent Application Information Retrieval System (PAIR).
None of the USPTO’s trademark systems have been affected by the emergency maintenance, according to the agency.
Although the EFS systems are now operational and allow for filing and fee payment, the agency has advised that the content viewable to applicants in PAIR may not be valid past August 15.
“We are now seeing some real time data appearing in PAIR, but it will take some more time for all the data to fill in,” the USPTO said.
It told applicants to “proceed with the understanding that content since August 15 may still be unavailable”.
In addition to PAIR, a number of systems are not yet fully functional, according to the USPTO. These include the Electronic Patent Assignment System, the Patent Global Dossier Public Access Dossier, and the Office of Enrolment and Discipline Information System.
The USPTO also advised that paper documents filed since the outage will not appear on the agency’s systems for five to ten business days.
It added that those who now file applications electronically on the newly-restored EFS “will likely see a delay” in those documents becoming available to view on the system.
Over the past week, the USPTO has repeatedly said it does not plan to extend deadlines given the availability of the alternative filing methods.
However, this caused controversy, as a fee of $400 is applicable to international patent applications made by post, while the same application made via the electronic filing system costs just $240.
On Tuesday, the USPTO pledged to issue refunds to applicants forced to pay higher filing fees while the electronic patent systems are unavailable. The agency has not yet revealed the procedure applicants need to take to receive a refund.
Ariel Reinitz, partner at FisherBroyles’ New York office, criticised the agency’s response to the fee issue on Twitter yesterday.
He questioned why the USPTO is not automatically waiving or refunding all surcharges, rather than providing an option of a refund “to applicants who follow some (yet to be determined) re-submission procedures”.
Updates on the remaining offline systems will continue to be published here.
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