Comment by Anonymous

RE: Agency Information Collection Activities; Proposals, Submissions, and Approvals: DOCX Submission Requirements - 0651-0089 DOCX Submission Requirements Posted by the Patent and Trademark Office on Apr 27, 2026 Document ID: PTO-P-2026-0331-0001 The burden is unequal: The burden of docx filing is not fairly or evenly distributed and it can impose a much greater burden on small or disadvantaged applicants. I work at a small IP firm with 10-20 patent attorneys. We have paid to have access to Microsoft brand products including Word. Access or subscriptions can commonly cost about $500 per person, so this is a non-negligible impact (it is assumed that both staff and attorneys would need access to the software). When I draft an application myself using Microsoft Word, I rarely encounter upload issues. However, we also work with foreign associates who provide documents for us to file, and we work with small inventors who initially want to do some of their own drafting and have us do just a final review. And sometimes we are filing a continuation or divisional that is transferred in and only a pdf is available. Received documents are sometimes problematic and the USPTO Patent Center system fails to upload those or provide sufficient guidance to fix the problems. Last month, another attorney and I both spent about an hour-and-a-half troubleshooting a single filing when the DOCX version would upload initially but generated errors that prevented it from being accepted. We had opened it in Word, saved it in word, inspected it with word tools and attempted to remove all metadata and much formatting, however the problem persisted. (It may have related to bookmarks, error code 2022 which prevents proceeding, rather than error code 4003 which merely notifies that bookmarks will be removed; error code 2022 does not tell you where in the lengthy document the problem can be found, it just prevents you from uploading the document). The USPTO estimate for time per application may be significantly underestimating the burden, particularly for firms that either don’t use Microsoft brand Word or who receive a high percentage of document from entities that don’t draft the document in Word. It is also likely an underestimate in fields that use more symbols, Greek letters, subscripts, superscripts, formulas, and other non-standard characters, which are quite common in some technological fields. The burden is too high: The DOCX surcharge is unreasonably high. Given that a few years ago, the USPTO itself estimated its cost of doing optical character recognition of pdf submissions at about three or four dollars per application, it seems unreasonable that the Patent Office charges a surcharge that is 100 times greater than their actual cost. The burden is unnecessary: It is not clear why the Patent Office doesn’t just allow pdfs with fonts and readable text like almost every other court and federal agency does. It would be nice if either PDF or DOCX were accepted with no surcharge. -Anonymous small firm registered patent attorney, submitted June 26, 2026