America-Israel Patent Law Blog

What’s The Point of An Electronic Record That Can Be Arbitrarily Changed And Doesn’t Even Reflect The Record When It’s Not Changed?

At the end of April I wrote about a case in which I went to file a response on the last day before extension fees would be due, and how the ILPTO’s patent electronic filing system (EFS) nevertheless erroneously told me that an extension fee was due, and wouldn’t let me submit the response unless I paid the fee.

After some back-and-forth emails with the ILPTO, the response was placed in the file, although it showed a submission date of May 1 rather than the correct date of April 30.  At least the ball was back in the examiner’s court.

Until today. Today I received a warning letter – what the ILPTO calls a “pk 10 letter” – telling me that a response had not been filed and that I had one month to file a response (with appropriate extension fees, of course). See the screen shot at right.

My instinct was to file a response asking them to rescind the pk 10 letter.  In principle, there is such an option in the EFS. Except that in the “new” EFS, it didn’t list “request to rescind pk 10 letter” as an option, and in the old system, it listed that as an option, but said that I could not file such a request in this application, i.e. there was no p.k. 10 letter Issued. Even though I had received that pk 10 letter only a few minutes before.

So I took some screen shots, showing both the filing of the response (with the incorrect May 1 date) and the issuance of the pk 10 letter (see screenshot at left), and fired off some more emails, asking the ILPTO to issue a letter admitting that the pk 10 letter was sent erroneously and rescinding it.  Within 2 hours I got an email telling me that (a) there had been a problem on April 30 with the EFS but that that problem had been fixed, (b) my response had been filed on April 30, and (c) the “pk 10” letter had been dealt with.

While I appreciate the quick response, part (a) sounded more like an excuse than something relevant, especially since I had already been told in the April-May correspondence that there was a bug in the “new” system. But parts (b) and (c) sounded great…until I went into the ILPTO’s database. There I found that (1) the date of the response was still listed as May 1, and (2) rather than issuing me a letter saying that the pk 10 letter had been sent erroneously and was now rescinded, the ILPTO just made the pk 10 letter disappear from the file. See the screen shot below.

The ILPTO’s database constitutes the official record of the application. What’s the point of that being the case when the database can contain both false positive representations (response was filed on May 1 when it was filed on April 30) and false negative representations (someone looking at the file now won’t see the pk 10 letter and will never know that the office issued it)?