Economists like to explain how attempts by states to control economies almost always result in failure, such as shortages or surpluses of goods. A textbook example, happening right now in Israel, is the lack of butter, which has missing from store shelves for over a year.
While Israel is now widely viewed as an innovative country and a tech powerhouse, the modern state was founded with heavy socialist underpinnings, and many of the institutions and legal structures that reflected and reinforced that worldview are still in place today. Hence there are price controls on many common foodstuffs, including butter.
Turns out that they’ll pay more for butter in China than the local butter manufacturer (yes, singular, for all intents and purposes, there’s only one) is allowed to charge in Israel, so much more that even after refrigerated shipping charges it’s still more profitable to sell Israeli butter in China. So all the butter made here is getting shipped to Beijing and its sister cities.
So why not import butter, say from the EU? Well, there are import duties. To protect the local butter manufacturer, of course, the one that no longer sells in Israel. Those duties make the cost of imported butter so high it’s not really worth it for anyone to import, because most Israelis won’t buy the imported stuff at that price.
And of course, there are mutual recriminations between the twits in the Agriculture Ministry and the twats in the Commerce Ministry, each blaming the other for not rescinding the import duties, and for not removing the price controls so that it’s economically efficient to sell butter in Israel. In the meantime, we’re without butter.
By now you should be asking, But this is a patent blog, and what’s all this got to do with the price of tea, er, butter, in China?
Well it’s only tangentially related, because the Israel butter story is about government regulation screwing up the market, whereas the next story is about government monopoly screwing up the market. But I wanted to get that butter story out there for those who are unfamiliar with it.
Hitherto, the USPTO maintained two PAIR systems with which one can view patent files, i.e. the documents submitted by applicants and the correspondence between the applicants and the PTO: private PAIR, and public PAIR. Public PAIR, as its name suggests, shows things in applications that have been published and are thus open to the public. Private PAIR, sensibly enough, allows inventors and practitioners to see their own files before those files have published. Also sensibly enough, until now, users of private PAIR could also access publicly available files of other practitioners via private PAIR. In other words, for users of private PAIR, the system offered both the private AND public PAIR functionalities. I could see someone else’s unpublished file through private PAIR, but I could see his published file through private PAIR, as well my own files, published or not.
But now that’s gone. Without prior warning (or little prior warning), the USPTO this week restricted users of private PAIR to viewing only those file associated with their own customer number, forcing those users to use public PAIR to view other files.
To people who don’t use PAIR, this may not sound like much. I mean, it just means you need to keep two tabs open in your browser, right?
But those of us who use PAIR regularly, this is unbelievably stupid and wasteful. To start with, there are a relatively small number of users of private PAIR, and you have to jump through some hoops to be able to use it (like proving who you are), and to log in to the system you have to identify yourself with two-step authentication. In other words, it’s reasonably secure, not really susceptible to abuse (like massive data downloading, although why that should be banned isn’t clear to me since the public information is supposed to be…public), and the USPTO can easily identify the abusers and if necessary pull their login credentials. And since most of us who use private PAIR make our livings doing so, we’re pretty unlikely to do anything within the system that will result in loss of that private PAIR access.
Public PAIR, however, is open to anyone. The only information the PTO has about public PAIR users is their IP address, which can masked or spoofed or changed by using a VPN. And for us practitioners who login via private PAIR, there’s no consideration given: we have to prove to public PAIR we’re not a robot every time we go in.
To give an example of the cumbersomeness of this: I’m handling a file that’s a continuation of an earlier, published case. Previously, if I wanted to see the parent case, I just clicked on a hyperlink from within private PAIR and voila, I got to the parent case file, even though I’m not the attorney of record on the earlier case. But now, when I’m in my case, if I want to see the parent, I have to open a separate tab, do the captcha thing in public PAIR, enter the application number, and hope that the system doesn’t crash due to heavy user volume.
This change feels particularly like a kick in the teeth because, as Carl Oppedahl points out, it’s us private PAIR users (or rather, EFS users, but there’s close to 100% overlap between the two groups, and logging into one logs you into the other) who pay the bulk of the fees the USPTO receives every year. You’d think they’d take that into account, but noooo. We can’t take our business to another patent office. The USPTO is the only address if you want a US patent.
Ten years ago I wrote a post about the USPTO not caring because it doesn’t have to. Nothing’s really changed. Ernestine is still alive and well and working at the USPTO.
Unlike 10 years ago, in this case, I plan to express my displeasure to the members of the Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC), which is supposed to oversee PTO operations. There’s no excuse for this particular change. That is, if I can find email addresses for the PPAC members: the USPTO provides no contact information for these individuals. Par for the course, I guess.
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