America-Israel Patent Law Blog

I posted the following earlier today on one of Carl Oppedahl's listserves – sort of a follow-on to this earlier post.  So far positive responses, but no one coming forward with the name of the individual I'm seeking.

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My question today is straightforward: who is the director of the Office of Patent Application Processing (OPAP)?  That's all the info I really need, and I can't find it on the PTO's web site.

You can stop reading now, but feel free to read the following exercise in venting, the substance of which I know many of you can relate to.

We have a patent that issued recently.  We filed a divisional a few weeks before issuance.

We have now received a notice from the Office of Patent Application Processing (OPAP): there's a problem with the drawings in the divisional.  

The letter from OPAP is (as usual) inscrutable.  All it says is that the drawings are unacceptable because "The drawings must be reasonably free from erasures and must be free from alterations, overwriting, interlineations, folds, and copy marks. See Figs. XX and YY."  When I look at those drawings, I don't see any of those defects.

More to the point, the drawings in this application are the exact same drawings that OPAP had no problem with when the parent case entered the national stage a few years ago. The exact same drawings that issued in the parent case today!  Is OPAP saying the issued patent is invalid?

My guess is that there are some dashed lines in the drawings that are related to in the specification, that the Examiner or anyone skilled in the art will understand when read in conjunction with the spec.  But that the geniuses in OPAP think constitute stray lines.  Because, you know, they know better than the inventors. Or the Examiner who examined and allowed the parent case.

OPAP-originating stupidity is a recurring theme in this forum. How many threads have there been about the idiocy associated with filing of new application data sheets?  I'm sick of this stupidity. If there really is a problem with the drawings in this case, or in any case, OPOP should provide a copy of the problematic drawings with colored markings showing exactly where in those drawings the alleged problems occur.  Or it can provide a phone number that connects to the person who issued the letter, so you can get real clarification. (There's no phone number on this particular notice, just an "e-signature" that says /fberhane/.  The employee locator on the PTO web site says the person is named Frehiwot Berhance, but calling that number, (703)756-1385, yields no human answer, just a 1-second unintelligible voice after several rings, followed by a beep to leave a message.)  Either of those alternatives would be infinitely more efficient than the present "guess what I'm thinking" game, in which you guess what's bothering OPAP and file new papers, only to be told by the OPAP, in yet another inscrutable letter, "nyeah nyeah, you guessed wrong, try again!".  

I heard recently about a case in which the application was assigned, and the assignment is on record, but the PTO refuses to recognize a power of attorney signed by the assignee of record because there's no application data sheet on file listing the assignee as a non-applicant assignee. Something's amiss when dumb PTO formalities trump the law to preclude the acceptance of a valid POA.

There's no excuse for the tremendous waste of time and money that OPAP forces applicants to spend on what can only charitably be described as pure b.s.

As I said at the outset, my question for the list is, who is the director of OPAP? The employee locator doesn't say. We want to speak directly with him to get this issue resolved. I'm not going to have anyone at our end waste time chasing after squirrels who are afraid of their own shadow (who probably won't want to talk to us anyway if we say we're the attorney and not the inventor, because we haven't filed a POA yet, because first we want to record the assignment from the parent case in this case, and then file a POA from the assignee). Nor will we waste time filing papers that don't need to be filed. I want to go straight to the top to resolve this.