PTO Plans System Maintenance

The Patent and Trademark Office will perform maintenance on certain systems next week, which will make access unavailable to its online patent application filing systems, it said in a news release Thursday. The maintenance will be from 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. Nov. 7, and will affect online accessibility to its public and private Patent Application Information Retrieval systems, plus EFS-Web and EFS-Web Contingency electronic filing systems, said the PTO. During the outage, patent applicants can submit new documents, applications and fee payments by mail using procedures here, but are encouraged to transmit electronic filings before the outage period, the release said.