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[4LegsGood]

Hi!

I'm an IP administrator for a small instrument company. We have one in house patent agent, and I'm studying to take the patent bar.

We've never filed an application electronically, and I've resisted learning how it's done simply because I know how to fix paper screw ups, and I'd rather not screw up on an electronically filed document and not know what we've done and how we can recover from it.

I would, however, ultimately like to figure it out. Is there any good tutorial or training documents anyone could suggest?

Thanks!

David

[still_studying]

The USPTO has some information on their website, but honestly, I don't see why anyone would file paper in this day and age (other than, perhaps, to beat a midnight deadline through the use of an all-night post office in a non-East Coast timezone).

PDFCreator, CutePDF, and other similar "virtual printer" tools let you "print" directly to PDF, so you can see exactly what you're going to be submitting.  You might need to pick up a scanner (mine was $80) to scan in forms that require, e.g., inventors' signatures (or just use an S-signature, if the document doesn't require a real one).

One note, you'll want to keep the claims, drawings, and rest of the specification in separate PDFs.  Also any sequences, etc.  The USPTO filing site has you upload each section individually.  (You *can* upload as a single file, but then they make you go through a bunch of operations to identify each section, and the one time I tried it, the website got hung up due to a browser compatibility problem.  Better to keep them separate in the first place.)

Some threads on the same general topic:
http://www.intelproplaw.com/ip_forum/index.php?topic=8449.0
http://www.intelproplaw.com/ip_forum/index.php?topic=8469.0

[Jonathan]

Sorry that the patent office website hiccuped during your one attempt to upload an application when you identified the sections, page to page.

For the most part, I have found that it works fine.

That one blip you experienced most likely is unrelated to EFS functionality to identify patent application sections in one file. More likely is that something along the pipeline was experiencing connectivity issues - your ISP, the PTO or somewhere in between.

Just providing another data point

[still_studying]

Could be, but I got the impression it was due to an older version of Firefox/Mozilla which didn't handle the DHTML in the way that EFS's programmers intended.  (I don't know whether it was the browser or the DHTML code that was at fault).  It allowed two page ranges of subsections to be identified, but wouldn't open up a third row of entry boxes to keep going.

I don't remember whether I tried it in MSIE.  I just broke the application into separate PDF files, and since these didn't require identifying the subsections as page ranges within one big file, it worked fine.

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I also have some concerns about what the consequences from OIPE might be if one were to misidentify a page range, e.g., having a form followed by ten pages of specification followed by two pages of claims, where a filer accidentally doesn't account for the initial page form, and submits that the spec is on pages 1-10 and the claims are on pages 11-12.  Alternately, assuming that EFS does a page count and warns that there are 13 pages, what if the filer gets the order wrong and thinks the form is on page 13 rather than page 1?  Does this result in a "missing pages" problem, or would OIPE take the time and trouble to sort it all out?

Overall, I feel more comfortable submitting separate files, clearly identified by their filenames ("oscillator_claims.pdf", "oscillator_abstract.pdf", "oscillator_drawings.pdf" ...), so that I don't have to worry about that.  As long as I verify that the contents of each file are complete and correct (no missing pages, no data corruption), and that I haven't forgotten any sections, I probably won't have as many nightmares.