In order to fulfill his duties, which include deciding inter partes disputes concerning patent and trademark applications and registrations (e.g. oppositions and cancellation proceedings), the ILPTO Commissioner has quasi-judicial powers. Once upon a time, as in back in the days when typewriters were still the standard, various of his quasi-judicial decisions were collected and published every few years. These days, about once a month the ILPTO posts batches of recent decisions on its website.
That’s all fine and good as long as the website works, and when I last checked the site a few months ago, one could find a list of decisions and scroll them. But I found this week that instead of having all the decisions available for scrolling through, with a search engine to help locate decisions of interest, the site now only makes the decisions available through a search engine – there’s no list of decisions to scroll through. While a search engine is a nice thing to have, the ability to look at a full list is also a good feature. So why’d they get rid of it?
But it gets better: the search engine doesn’t work. The search engine has a “free text” field”, an “area of interest” field which is divided into “expenses”, “designs”, “trademarks”, “patents” and “compensation and royalties” sub-fields; a “type of proceeding” field which is divided into “service inventions and defense inventions”, “revocation and cancellation”, “requests for cancellation”, “requests for revocation”, “competing applications”, “expenses”, “reinstatement”, “opposition”, “ex parte”, “apellations of origin”, and “extension orders” sub-fields; and a “type of decision” field that is divided into “interim” and “principal” sub-fields. One can also search by date range. But even though the engine allows searching based on various criteria, none of them return hits, even when search criteria are used that are supposed to provide hits.
For example, on December 30, 2013, the deputy Commissioner granted a request to restore patent no. 196651 after this patent had lapsed for non-payment of a renewal fee. The decision was circulated a few days later to the ILPTO’s email list. But when you search on the “decisions” part of the site for this patent number, the search engine says there are no hits (see screen shot).
In fact, if a search for decisions during any time during the last seven or so years yields no results (see screen shot).
This change-and-failure is true not only for the ILPTO’s quasi-judicial decisions, but also for various administrative announcements and circular memoranda as well. Those too used to be posted in list format; now all that’s there is an inoperable search engine. So if you want to see recent decisions or announcements, tough.
Is the ILPTO is trying to hide something from the public (and if so, what)? Or did the ILPTO hire the same people who designed the Obamacare site do this “upgrade”?
Ironically, this sequestering of information from the public comes on the heels of a January 1 press release – which IS visible on the ILPTO’s site – announcing greater transparency in the site itself. Supposedly, for example, one can now search the patents database on the basis of classification per the latest international classification scheme. But when we clicked on the “international classification search” tab in the ILPTO database, all we got was an error message: “Not Found The requested URL /tacsy/ was not found on this server”. What was posted, on a different site, was what appears to be xml data from old Patents Journals – name of applicant, title of invention, application number, address for service. Which is nice historical information to have, but of little use when one is looking for ILPTO decisions on a particular topic.
We're waiting in great anticipation to know how the ILPTO defines opaqueness.
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