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I'll agree that many of the tools are bad. I have a particular dislike for how slow Word is. But, I don't think that transitioning everything to the cloud is necessarily going to help. Word is slow many times because it freezes up when syncing. And a lot of the tools are good. EAST and PE2E Search have a lot of great features for power searchers that I'd like to see in tools outside of the USPTO. (But they also have a lot of annoyances.)

I don't think more than 1/3 or so of my time is wasted due to these sorts of things. That's significant, but it won't be the game changer that doubling examination time would be.

I don't know anything about what's happening on the backend, for what it's worth. I assume that it's always near exploding.

By the way, you can find a bunch of annoying time wasters listed by examiners here: https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/comments/y9pyfx/mild...

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

But wouldn’t doubling the time reduce pressure for innovation here?

Improving the time/quality of examination would reduce the number of bad patents, and thus raise the bar for something to get patented, requiring MORE actual innovation, and less fake process based crap.

Pressure for (perceived) innovation is one of the things that drives bad patents. Removing this pressure has positive consequences (in addition to the negative consequence of potentially novel IP not being protected in time--but is that actually a bad thing? I don't know).

There's a parallel also in the world of academic paper publishing--the pressure for constantly innovating and publishing is a major reason for bad publications.

I am speaking anecdotally, from my experience as a past PhD student and a current young professional in the research industry.

How would the examiners be able to turn "limited time" into incentive to create "innovation in tools" [that they themselves aren't the ones building]?

Old orgs with old tools aren't improved by putting more pressure just on the users of those tools.

You are right that a transition to the cloud is not going to help. Bad software will still be bad in the cloud, good software can be just as good (and often better on several axes) when not in the cloud. Though from reading some of the complaints in the thread you link here, Amazon does have very good OCR software (called Textract), so that could help.

But on this point:

> And while search technology has improved, it hasn't become orders of magnitude better.

In general it has, it is just that the USPTO's software hasn't. I imagine a team of the right 2-5 people could make something better than you would wish for in your wildest dreams. But how to actually make that happen is another kettle of fish. Anyone capable of fixing this would most likely be better remunerated doing something else, but nerds are easy to snipe and even just reading your gripes here and in the subreddit has made me want to solve this problem if for no other reason than the humanitarian one.

> In general it has, it is just that the USPTO's software hasn't.

On the contrary, USPTO's internal search tool (PE2E Search) is overall good and has many features that I wish public search engines like Google had. The main difference is that it's designed for power searchers, not the general public. Yes, PE2E Search has a lot of issues, but the USPTO contractor who commented here has probably never used it to search for patents and thus has no basis for comparison. You should take what they said with that caveat in mind.

My basic point is that no existing search technology makes up for the sheer increase in documents to search. The last significant innovation in patent search was switching to computerized search in the 90s. The changes since then have been relatively minor, but the number of documents to search since then has increased dramatically. Maybe some AI based search will eventually be a game changer, but for now it's not (I've tried 5+ AI search tools and they usually aren't good) and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Also see these other comments I made:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509535

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506241

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

what does the cloud have to do with the tools being old and creaky?

Is there some magic sauce that makes the search suddenly useful once it's sitting in AWS?

I ask because I see this ALL the time. technical people abusing business ignorance by using initiatives to improve tools to "move to the cloud". Unless you're telling me the problem you're solving has to do with elastic demand or too much costs maintaining infrastructure, this does NOTHING to solve the actual problem.

Do we imagine that suddenly this organization is going to start maintaining their stuff if it's sitting on AWS servers instead of their own?

"move to the cloud" is a top strategic objective in my org

I have explained why it should not be, but Mgmt does not care.

Everyone's doing it. We NEED to do it.

I believe we are in a mix of FOMO, resume-driven development and empire-building.

Ok, I can tell that you want me to expand. Here goes:

Cloud may offer:

1) improved scalability (both horizontal and vertical)

2) improved availability

3) reduced cost

None of these are guaranteed and will require much expertise in both initial choice-making and continuing execution.

We don't really have that expertise.

Do you?

> None of these are guaranteed and will require much expertise in both initial choice-making and continuing execution.

I feel confident saying that the government does not have this expertise and never will, so this just seems like yet another taxpayer-funded boondoggle (aka, the status quo).

> 3) reduced cost

From what I've always heard, of all the benefits the cloud has, reduced cost is not one of them unless your compute need is exceptionally small (ie, you only need a few t3.* instances).

That’s because nobody who cut costs feels compelled to go out and proselytize about it. At the start of the pandemic I helped dozens of customers cut their spending to $XX pm as they were inherently crippled during COVID (think travel, hospitality). My management team at AWS supported this effort. It was actually one of our strategic goals.

Anti cloud zealots are having their time just like pro cloud zealots did. You have to understand your workloads and cloud offerings to see if it’s right for you.

"You have to understand your workloads and cloud offerings to see if it’s right for you."

Yes

This is hard to do.

As one of the loud "anti-cloud zealots" out there, I agree with you that this is actually a workload-dependent decision (or a luxury product that you can buy to show that your company is rich and modern). I think a lot of big companies are going to be moving toward "hybrid cloud" in the near future if they haven't already: maintaining a few racks (or an entire DC) to handle their base load and then doing bursts of heavy computing in the cloud.

The days of the full cloud lift-and-shift are going away, and we're getting to the point where people make that decision rationally.

As an aside, I actually believe in the cloud enough that I am working on a startup for a piece of cloud infrastructure.

how does improved scalability, improved availability, and reduced cost help the patent examiners make more reliable decisions?

It doesn't, that's the point, you're adding to the same noise everyone else is.

You're right. It's just a random side convo that came out of the main thread.

Reduced cost.

Yeah, we’ll see there. This is the federal government, not a startup.

Our company matches what you describe to a T. We have some small web servers/services, but none under any significant load. No need to scale dynamically, yet we use Docker (with Swarm) on prem for like 3 worker nodes. So much complexity added because of FOMO and resume-padding.

And then the key decision-maker says if we don't do cloud architected systems, we'll have trouble recruiting developers with suitable skills...

"Move to the cloud" is usually an excuse for big organizations like the USPTO to modernize their technology and business processes. Business executives, for some reason, expect "cloud" to be more modern than "on-prem" so the modernization of your business processes and modernization of the feel of the UI goes along with a move to cloud.

It's really dumb.

The only benefit I've seen to "move to the cloud" without a full re-write is you can now double the performance of your cloud server without a full reinstall. Sometimes.

And end up with not much gain. :(

    You pack your bags And you move to the cloud
    There's somethin' missin' here at home

    When you, you gonna move to the cloud?
    Into the cloud where it all began

    I'm always buyin' With the local and the junkies
    This cloud life is one big pain!
    But you, you had to move to the cloud
    Into the cloud where it all began

Is it possible to use publicly available patent office data to create a parallel database and tools which the PTO folks could use? Perhaps there is room for the development of an open-source collaborative effort to create a parallel data to fight back the trolls?

Anyone else feel free to chime in!

I used a patent lawyer who said the patent had to be filed using a fax machine.

For those who are too young, a fax machine is this arcane device that used to be everywhere, like a remote photocopier.

Got the US patent dated 2013. Was the lawyer pulling my leg?

It wouldn't surprise me, as faxes have some really weird legal exceptions carved out for them. For example, a faxed document is considered equivalent to the original, but a scanned image is not. So even though a scanned image signed with your private key would be much more verifiable than a faxed copy that is transmitted without encryption and printed in a shared office, the law considers the fax as better than the scanned image.

Which is all to say that it wouldn't surprise me if there were a legal requirement for an "original document", and if that requirement could only be met by physical mail or fax.

At least in the medical world the security requirements of documents at rest is much higher than ones in transit. So you can't easily do efax because as soon as you have a queued pdf its at rest. (It can be done. just not easily.) So when everybody switches over to voip they usually try to keep the old fax machines going which faxing over voip is hit or miss.

Faxes are (or were originally) point-to-point electronic transmissions -- one fax machine dialing via POTS to another fax machine. In addition, the received fax, and the response sheet received by the sender, have time and date stamps that give legally-admissible proof of transmission and reception (and the sender will get a report of failure if that's the case as well).

As a former fax server administrator (and troubleshooter/maintainer of everyday standalone fax machines), I think the point-to-point nature of traditional, non-Internet fax is the killer feature: no packets split up and resting on intermediate servers, etc. Fax servers have one or more individual fax modem cards, so the only network involved is before or after the actual fax transmission.

I know fax is outdated. There are other effective technologies to replace it. But I've found myself more than once speaking up as a defender of the technology because, as originally used and codified into law, it serves a specific purpose and, as a bonus, if you know how to use a photocopier and a telephone it's drop-dead simple to use.

The underlying telephone network is in most cases packet-switched now anyway, so fax-to-fax is exactly as point-to-point as a TCP connection.

Once again, law lags behind technology.

No, patent applications don't need to be filed via fax. I've heard bad things about the various USPTO websites, so fax might have been the guy's preference as I can see it being relatively simpler.

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

Certain patent types are required by law to be submit via facsimile. It’s in the code of federal regulations.

This comes up almost immediately when studying to be a parent examiner.

Interesting. I stand corrected.

> This comes up almost immediately when studying to be a parent examiner.

To my knowledge, this wasn't part of my training. Perhaps you mean studying for the patent bar? I'm not a patent attorney or agent, just an examiner.

What is the issue exactly ?

AFAIK email to fax (and vice-versa) converters have existed for a while ?

I'm much more annoyed that in 2022 we are still misusing pdf, treating it as a digital-first format rather than one more appropriate for archival of paper documents... (and with the associated "pdfs cannot be modified" myth)

PDFs are sort of lazy/arcane. Easy for author hard for reader. Layout your information for a print size and forever it shall stay. Bad for reading on most devices.

Why isn't a new system built from the ground up in parallel instead of trying to swap the engine in a moving car?