I’m a fan of the USPTO’s electronic filing system (EFS) and Patent Application Information Retrieval system (PAIR) for patent applications. The former enables applicants to file applications and responses, and to pay fees, online – no papers to print, no envelopes to fill, no trips to the post office, just a computer and a program to generate pdf files. The latter allows applicants to check on the status of their own applications, as well as those of others. I’m waiting for the day when the Israel PTO gets around to enabling both of these.
What I’m not so keen on is the USPTO’s method for alerting applicants when an examiner has mailed an office action. The USPTO presents applicants and practitioners with a choice: either we can receive notices in a given application by snail mail, or we can receive them by email, but we can’t have both. Personally, since I receive far more email correspondence each day than snail mail correspondence (who doesn’t?), I choose to have notices in my cases sent by snail mail – I figure they’re less likely to get lost in the shuffle than if they’re sent by email.
That calculus is of course predicated on the assumption that letters sent by snail mail will actually reach me – or that I have another way of being notified in case something goes awry. In my case, it’s the latter: I check PAIR almost daily for actions in my cases, and I docket on the basis of PAIR. So in practice it doesn’t really matter much if I receive USPTO communications by email or snail mail – I’m going to see any action within a day of its being posted on PAIR.
The good thing about checking PAIR for USPTO communications is that it shows that the snail mail sent to me by the USPTO does get through, usually within about 7-10 days of being posted on PAIR. This week, though, there was a glitch. An OA was mailed in one of my cases about three weeks ago, and thanks to PAIR it’s in my docket, but I still haven’t seen the hard copy. Yesterday I received an email from the USPTO, telling me that the letter mailed in that case had been returned to the USPTO as undeliverable.
At that point the USPTO said, Here’s the address we have on file for you, please report any change of address to us. And attached to the email was a pdf form for reporting an address change.
Truthfully, it’s good to know that that the USPTO keeps tabs on undelivered mail, and that it tries to contact intended recipients when letters are returned. And at first blush, the USPTO’s response in this case makes sense: if a letter gets returned, the sender is going to wonder if the address is correct.
But there are two things in this instance that bother me. First, no other piece of correspondence from the USPTO addressed to me has ever been returned to the USPTO, including mail sent around the same time as the OA in question. This is first time the USPTO has mailed something that didn’t get through to me. But with budget cuts and all, I can understand the USPTO not being able to spend the time poking through all my files to determine that this is an isolated incident.
What I find more curious is what wasn’t attached to the email: a copy of the OA itself. It’s ironic that the USPTO is willing to rely on email to inform me that a letter it sent me didn’t get through, but that, rather than attach the letter in question to that same email, the USPTO would prefer that I fill out a change of address form and return it to the USPTO, so that the USPTO can use another envelope and another stamp to send the same letter by snail mail. In this case, it would have been a lot more efficient for the USPTO to have included a copy of the OA.
I responded to the email by informing the USPTO that I hadn’t moved and that snail mail to that address had been arriving. And although I suggested allowing applicants and practitioners to be notified by both snail mail and email, I figured that the USPTO was so intent on snail mailing the letter to me, I shouldn’t mention that I already had a copy of the OA and that there was no need to re-send it.