I, like others who use the Israel PTO’s patent electronic filing system, have (sadly) come to expect both defects in the system and indifference on the part of the ILPTO in response to our complaints about those defects. I’m happy to report that, with regard to a bug in a different part of the ILPTO’s system, at least one person at the ILPTO wants to see the bug fixed.
The problem in question concerns the ILPTO’s system for recording things like changes in the name of the applicant (or patentee), or the list of inventors, or the address of the applicant or the address for service, or the legal representative. It’s not uncommon for applicants with medium-to-large portfolios to be represented by more than one firm, and so when, say, an applicant changes its address, one of the firms representing the applicant will file papers with the ILPTO to record the change, the ILPTO then records the change across all of the applications/patents owned by the entity, and then the ILPTO sends a notice to all the relevant firms informing them of the change in address across all of the applicant’s files.
In the case in question, I received a notice in August informing me of a change in application X of an entity I represent in multiple applications/patents: the applicant had merged with another company and thus its name and address had changed. I myself had not submitted a request to record such a change, but as I said above, it’s not unusual for one firm to submit the notice of the change and for the change to be recorded across all the relevant files and for the relevant firms to be informed of the change. Here, I had not even been informed about the merger and name change, which is unusual. But especially strange – and troubling – were the facts that (a) the PTO letter only referred to that one case, not to any of the other cases I handle for the original company, (b) the letter didn’t refer to any other cases of the original company in which it was represented by others, which would have been the normal procedure, and (c) the letter was addressed only to me, not cc’d to any of the firms, which would normally be the case in such a situation. Additionally, application X, the sole application listed on the notice, there was nothing in the online file history showing that a request for a change had been submitted or providing documentation of the change.
So I immediately wrote to the person in charge of recording these changes and asked him to point out in which file the request to record the change and the accompanying documentation had been submitted. After not receiving an answer after 5 weeks, I wrote a follow-up email, and received a response the same day. The person apologized for the delay, but wrote that he didn’t understand my question, and asked for clarification. The next day, as I was writing him back, he called me and explained that he had been looking into the situation more, had concluded they had a problem at their end, and asked me to help him work through it. Which I did.
Turned out the change had been recorded not in application X but in application number Y (also an application I handle) by a different firm (no surprise there), and included powers of attorney from the newly-named applicant for each of the relevant firms and listing each of the relevant files. But the letter from the ILPTO had been sent to me only, and only concerning the change of name of the applicant in application X. No notices had gone out concerning any of the other applications, not those handled by me and not those handled by other firms, not regarding the name change, and not regarding the appointment of POA. From my perspective, it was enough to know the application number in which the name change and POA had been submitted for recording. But for ILPTO – as the person who called me noted – there’s a bug that they need to fix. Hopefully the matter will be resolved soon.
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