We've refrained from ragging on the ILPTO electronic filing system for a while. Partly that's because criticizing IL-EFS is like shooting fish in a barrel, partly that's because no one wants to hear a perpetual complainer. If you don't like reading whines/rants/gripes, read no further. But if you too suffer using IL-EFS, you can commiserate about the following encounters, some recent, some from a while ago.
1. When you file something via IL-EFS, it emails you an acknowledgement that you filed whatever it was you filed. There's always a lag between when you click "submit" and when the acknowledgement email is sent. If you're lucky, that lag is only a few minutes, but until now our record was around 48 hours. The IL-EFS has now outdone itself: two weeks ago we paid a fee in a particular Israel patent application. This morning we received the acknowledgement email. Yay! (To be fair, since this was a file in which a payment was made, we were able to download a payment receipt immediately, and the system generates payment acknowledgement emails immediately as well, so we weren't really concerned about the delay in email acknowledgement of the submission per se. Still, until now, we couldn't see anything in the ILPTO database showing that the fee had been paid. Within a day the database should be updated to show the response filed two weeks ago. We hope. As of this minute, the ILPTO's patent database is down.)
2. We filed third-party prior art submissions in someone else's patent application. The system won't take .zip files, only .pdf files, so the choices are to (a) attach each file individually before uploading, or (b) combine all the files into a single .pdf, then attach and upload that. The former choice is particularly onerous, as, unlike PAIR or ePCT, which allow the user to first choose the application of interest, then choose the action and upload the documents, the Israel system (i) first makes the user choose the action he wishes to take, then (ii) indicate the file number, and only then (iii) does the system tell the user whether or not he can take that action. Denial of the ability to take action may be because the user isn't associated with that application (even though a power of attorney may have been filed), or the system may think the application is at a stage where a particular action isn't authorized (see the next entry for more on that).
Additionally, the system is fickle about pdfs, but doesn't explain why it won't accept a given .pdf. So if you go through (i), (ii) and (iii) but the system gags on your .pdf, you've gotta start over again. This is why filing a single .pdf may not be an option. That and size limits on uploads. But have no fear: if you succeed in uploading your pdfs and filing them, the IL-EFS will confirm that success by emailing back to you the same files you uploaded, all 20 MB of them...sometime within 24 hours of the upload. Because, apparently, that's easier than immediately issuing a filing acknowledgement form that lists all the files submitted. (The USPTO does this, and includes a number generated by a hash function to indicate the size of the pdf submitted.) Or having the uploaded documents automatically entered into the publicly visible database immediately upon uploading. (The USPTO does this too, although sometimes there are delays between submitting things via EFS and being able to see them in PAIR. But in at least 90% of the cases, there aren't.)
And if you have a problem with the IL electronic filing system? Don't worry, there's tech support. Sort of. Five days a week, for maybe eight hours each day, if the one ILPTO employee assigned to the task is at work that day and answers the phone. Otherwise, in the words of Rev. Johnson, "Son, you're on your own!"
3. By law, after the three month period for filing oppositions expires, an Israel patent application becomes a patent. Renewal fees that accrued prior to grant are then due within three months of the grant date. But the ILPTO is sometimes slow about actually issuing the patent certificate after the opposition period expires. So when we went to pay a renewal fee in a case that became a few days before, but for which the patent certificate hadn't yet been mailed, IL-EFS told us, "the application is not at a stage at which you can take that action". At least it didn't say it in that fake-calm Hal 9000 voice. Apparently the ability to pay the renewal fee is linked to the system recording the status of the patent as "granted" rather than pending", but the system doesn't automatically update that status upon termination of the opposition period without an opposition being filed. We're sure that when the patent certificate is sent out, the patentee won't be given additional time to pay that first set of renewal fees to compensate for this particular bug in the system.
4. In a point related to point 3, a client asked us to request suspension of examination. But in order to that you first have to respond to the ILPTO's pre-examination letter. So we filed the response to the pre-examination letter, then went to request the suspension...and the system said, "the application is not at a stage at which you can take that action". Here too, we had to wait for the IL-EFS to generate the acknowledgement email - in this case it took about an hour - before we could submit the suspension request. Why can't we just file everything together?