America-Israel Patent Law Blog

A while back I posted on the Israel PTO and Monty Python.  Now it’s the USPTO’s turn. 

MP fans are familiar with the “Cheese Shop” sketch, in which John Cleese plays Mousebender, a hungry patron who wanders into a cheese shop run by Mr. Wensleydale, played by Michael Palin.  After Mousebender runs through the names of about two or three dozen cheeses, none of which are in stock, Mousebender has the following observation:

MOUSEBENDER:

It's not much of a cheese shop, is it?

WENSLEYDALE:

Finest in the district, sir.

MOUSEBENDER:

Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.

WENSLEYDALE:

Well, it's so clean, sir.

MOUSEBENDER:

It's certainly uncontaminated by cheese.

What hath this to do with the USPTO, thou wondrest?  I shall tell thee in due course. 

I recently received a notice from the USPTO in an application I’d recently filed, and I disagreed with the course of action that the USPTO said needed to be taken.  So I tried to contact the person whose name (in between forward slashes, e.g. “/xxxx/”) appeared at the bottom of the letter.  Since no phone number was given for this person in the letter itself, I looked up the person’s telephone number in the employee locator. 

I should have known something was up when the description of the office in which the person works said, “Contractors assigned to PTOSS”.  I don’t know what PTOSS stands for – it sounds like a game played in the Patent Office in which applications are tossed in the air and if they land in one place they’re allowed and if they land in another place they’re rejected, which may not be far from the truth in some art units.  But “contractor” usually means the work has been outsourced, in which case the person who signed the letter was probably not going to be the best person to address my query.  My suspicion was out borne during the conversation that followed.  “We’re contractors, we’re not allowed to talk about any specific case.”  Ok, I said, do you at least know why you were told to send the letter you did in the situation I’ve described?  “I can’t talk about that.” 

So I turned to the telephone number which was given on the bottom of the letter, 571-272-4000, the so-called Application Assistance Unit (AAU).  This is where the real fun began. 

After I began to explain my dilemma, the voice at the other end asked for the application number, looked up the letter on PAIR…and essentially read the letter back to me.  It’s hard to express in words the relief I felt upon discovering that all those application and maintenance fees are helping to pay the salaries of the inhabitants of the AAU, so they can help us patent practitioners read our mail. 

Sensing the AAU was also leading to a dead end, and curious to test the limits of the assistance that might be had, I asked if I could speak to the person who’d written the letter.  Nope – “That work is contracted out.  The person who wrote the letter doesn’t work in the Patent Office.”  Well, can you give me a phone number?  “No, we don’t have any way to find out who wrote the letter.”  I guess it was a good thing I’d figured out on my own how to contact the person on the bottom of the letter, even if they themselves couldn’t talk to me about the letter they’d signed. 

So I decided to try a different tack.  Ok, I said to the voice, maybe you can explain what the problem is, and I started to explain just why I thought the PTO’s view of the situation was erroneous and asked for an explanation as to why I’d gotten the letter.  This too was beyond the purview of the AAU.  “I’m sorry sir, we don’t deal with the Rules, you’ll have to speak to someone in Patent Legal”. 

Truly, an Application Assistance Unit worthy of its name.  As Mousebender might say, It’s certainly uncontaminated by assistance.

In keeping with the way things were going, when the voice at the other end of the phone tried to pass me off to the Office of Patent Legal Administration (OPLA), the line rang once and then cut me off.  So I looked up the number for OPLA (571-272-7701) and tried again, and again I was cut off.  I tried again.  Same thing.  After several more attempts, I gave up on OPLA. 

With nowhere else to turn, I decided to contact the newly-formed-and-announced-to-much-fanfare Ombudsman Pilot Program.  Even here there was a catch: there’s no phone number to contact, just a small interface online in which you provide contact information so they can call you back.  Except the space for the phone number only allows for ten digits, which is something of a problem if, like me, you’re located outside the USA. 

Fortunately my office has a VOIP line with a US number.  So I provided my contact information, and this time my luck changed: within half an hour an ombudsman called me back.  And not some low-level flunkie of the variety who says “I have to ask my supervisor” when you ask him what time zone Virginia is in, but an examiner who’s listed on over 850 patents going back to the early 1980’s.  He was extremely helpful.  He looked at the file, told me what he thought the problem was, and said he would check within the PTO to make sure that was the case and get back to me.  Later in the week, he left both a voice mail and an email explaining the source of the problem, and gave me the direct phone number of someone at OPLA to discuss the matter with as well. 

So with respect to the Ombudsman’s office, I’ve got nothing but praise – the person who dealt with me was responsive and to the point.  In short, helpful.  It’s just a pity that it took the Ombudsman for me to get a straight answer.

The end of the story is that I spoke with the person at OPLA, who explained the Office’s interpretation of the Rules that led to the letter.  I disagree with that interpretation, but in this case (as is so many disagreements with the PTO), it’s just not worth fighting about.