2,200 Issued Patents and a criticism of Patent Center
We have passed another milestone - 2,200 issued patents.
In prior years we would have provided an easy-to-use link to all our published patents. Recently, the
USPTO has been promoting their new service
Patent Center. While the
USPTO has been advertising Patent Center as a modern replacement for their old system
PAIR, we have noticed that the new Patent Center system is missing a lot of the functionality of the old
PAIR system. The
USPTO has promised to reach feature parity and switch entirely over to Patent Center sometime in 2023. We remain skeptical.
Patent Center offers two new Patent search features. A
Basic Search and an
Advanced Search. The Basic Search seems relatively straightforward to use. But one thing it does not allow us to do is find all the patents that we have issued.
The Advanced Search can be described, politely, as having an awkward interface. The interface for the Advanced Search is difficult to work with on smaller screens, and we suspect the interface would be very confusing for anyone who does not work with it regularly. We consider our small team of attorneys to be technically proficient but for a small lawfirm to remain efficient we do not employ a dedicated IT team that can spend the time working through the intricacies of the Advanced Search system. We have found a way to link directly to a list of what should be all our issued patents. But, even so, providing a direct link does not work in all web browsers, so potential clients would not be able to view the link using their web browser of choice. Even if they can view the link properly in their browser of choice, we suspect most would find the data presentation to be subpar.
You can try the link to all our patents:
we have over 2,200 US Patents issued
We have found that the link does not work in
Firefox. The link does work in the web browser
Vivaldi. The link should work in other Chromium-based web browsers, but in a recent test using Microsoft's Edge browser that comes with Windows, we found that the link did not work. Regardless, we think that to provide a good, and accessible service, the
USPTO should not be forcing users to know whether or not they have a Chromium-based web browser. Particularly, when survey data from 2009 shows that
a significant portion of the population does not even know what a web browser is, nevermind what web browser they are using.
Our criticism of the new Patent Center is a bit of a digression from our announcement of our issued patents milestone. Since there isn't a clean way to provide a link to all our issued patents so you can see what our small electrical engineering based IP boutique lawfirm is about, we thought we could provide a few samples of our work:
Here are some electrical engineering patents from some of our large clients. These patents include IP based on DDR5 memory, video processing in drones, vehicle camera processing, time-lapse videos, video hardware, video encoding, computer vision and object analysis, IP security cameras, neural networks, and semiconductor fabrication:
Here are some patents from some of the independent innovators we have as clients. This IP includes computer vision, an app development platform, fiber optic cables, a water ski fin, a camera arm system and a clothing fastener:
- Chris Maiorana
- December 2022