Subject: Minor bug in IPR submission template

From: Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2011 22:17:59 -0400

Hi,

I have a filed accepted provisional patent application(s) that bears
on an IETF draft. RFC 3979 says
"The disclosure must list the numbers of any issued patents or
   published patent applications or indicate that the claim is based on
   unpublished patent applications."

That's fine, because provisional patent applications are not
published. But the IPR submission template only provides for "an
unpublished pending patent application". There is no sense that I
understand in which my provisional patent filing(s) are "pending".
They are fully accepted and there is no further action the US Patent
office is going to take on it/them.

The word "pending" should be stricken from the template. Having no
idea how long this will take to fix, I will probably go ahead and file
adding a Note explaining what is going on and pointing out this error
in the form.

Thanks,
Donald
=============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
 155 Beaver Street
 Milford, MA 01757 USA
 [email-masked]

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From: Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2011 23:31:20 -0400

Actually, things seem to be somewhat worse than I thought. The
template requires, and asserts that RFC 3979 requires, date of filing,
country of filing, and identifying numbers for granted patents or
published patent applications. Yet even when I click on the radio
button saying the disclosure is based on an unpublished application, I
get rejected for leaving these fields blank. And, in fact, I don't see
anything in RFC 3979 requiring date of filing or country of filing
although arguably country is necessary to provide context for any
identifying numbers.

Thanks,
Donald