Classic joke: Schwartz dies, and as his family is going through his things, in the pocket of one of his suits they discover a 15-year-old claim check for a pair of shoes under repair. They assume it’s unlikely the shoes are still there, but just in case, Schwartz’s son goes to the shop, which is still in business. He shows the claim check to the proprietor, and asks, “Is there any chance you still have these shoes?” The proprietor takes the claim check, and after rummaging through his stock for a few minutes, says, “They’ll be ready Tuesday!”
In response to yesterday’s post, I received an email from a colleague here in Israel, who related the following story:
Some time ago, he filed an Israel patent application, listing as applicants Inventor A and Inventor B in that order. Last week, he filed another Israel patent application for the same two inventors, but this time he reversed the order of inventors, viz. Inventor B and then Inventor A. To his surprise, on the filing receipt the inventors were listed in the order Inventor A, Inventor B. So he asked the Israel PTO to rectify the mistake. In response, the ILPTO sent him a notice published by the previous Commissioner in May 2014, and directed him to the fourth and fifth paragraphs of that notice. Translated, those paragraphs read,
“Recently, our attention has been drawn to the fact that, due to limitations in the PTO’s computer system, we cannot preserve the order of the applicants and inventors in the filing receipt, and these are automatically arranged in order of the customer number recorded for each party in the operating system. Therefore, an applicant or inventor who previously filed a patent application in Israel will appear on the filing receipt before a new applicant or inventor. The PTO is working to upgrade the computer system in a way that will enable, inter alia, complete correspondence between the details in the application filing form and the data in the computer system, including the order in which the applicant and inventors appear.
“Therefore, at this stage it is possible that the order in which the applicants and inventors appear in the filing receipt will not match the order on the filing form. At this stage you [viz. the community of applicants and their representatives] are asked to refrain from asking us to make corrections in such cases.”
Clearly this has been a high-priority item with the ILPTO in the interim. At least Schwartz’s shoes would be ready by Tuesday.
Legally, of course, the order of the applicants or inventors is irrelevant. But people can be finicky, and sometimes they want the parties to be listed in a particular order. So now we practitioners are left trying to explain to our clients why the order on the filing receipt isn’t the order in which we listed the parties.
To make matters worse, in 2014 we still filed using a filing form that we filled out ourselves. We submitted several copies, and one of those copies would make its way back to us, stamped by the ILPTO, showing that we had indeed listed the inventors in the order they indicated. But since June 2016, we’ve been required to submit electronically. Unlike the USPTO, which requires applicants to provide data like applicant name and address, inventor names and addresses, etc., on an Applicant Data Sheet, which can be filled in online but which most practitioners (or their staffs) fill in offline and submit as a completed document, the ILPTO only allows the inputting of the information online. So we have no record of the order in which we inputted the data, since the ILPTO does not provide this as part of the filing process.
There are at least two possible workarounds to this, neither of which is optimal. One is to take a screen shot of each completed screen in the submission process. That’s the less time-consuming option. The other option is more complicated: instead of choosing all the applicants or inventors from the ILPTO’s list of existing applicants and inventors, each with its associated customer number, one could choose only the first-listed applicant from the list of existing applicants, and then manually enter each subsequent applicant as a new applicant, in the order in which the applicants wish to appear. This will result in the creation of a new applicant name and customer number in the ILPTO’s computer system, and will guarantee that the order of applicants is preserved. It will also result in multiple entries and customer numbers for the same entity in the ILPTO’s computer system, but that’s the ILPTO’s problem.
This is the body that assesses the patentability of computer-related inventions in Israel.