PTO Plans Maintenance to Online Systems

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will perform maintenance on its online systems Saturday, making access unavailable to the public and private Patent Application and Information Retrieval systems, plus the electronic filing systems, it said in a news release Monday. The online systems will be down from 12:01 a.m. EST Saturday until 11:59 p.m. EST that day, said the PTO. During the outage period, patent applicants are encouraged to submit documents and fees by first class or priority mail, or by facsimile transmission, it said.