The National Intellectual Property Researchers Association (NIPRA), whose members “serve as the world’s main concentration point for IP information disseminated by the USPTO,” have sued the USPTO in District Court for the ED of Virginia. Their action was precipitated by the USPTO’s project to transition from a paper document collection to an online access system. Audits of the program indicate substantial data error and loss associated with scanning documents for the new database, rendering the records incomplete and often unusable. See my previous posting on these problems here.