The USPTO has its Gazette, which publishes faithfully every Tuesday at 12:01 AM (a fact that provided the title for my brother’s entertaining but sadly now mostly-defunct blog). The Israel PTO has its Patents Journal (and the corresponding Trademarks Journal and Designs Journal), which publishes sometime on the last workday of each Gregorian calendar month (keeping in mind that the ILPTO is open Sundays, and closed on Fridays, Saturdays, Jewish holy days, and certain other days).
One of the important functions of the Patents Journal is that publication in the Journal constitutes “acceptance” of the application under section 26 of the statute, which starts the clock running for the filing of pre-grant oppositions. By statute, that period runs for three months, and is not extendible, although if the deadline for filing an opposition falls on one of the aforementioned days when the ILPTO is closed, then by statute it gets pushed off until the next day on which the ILPTO is open. If no opposition is filed by the deadline, the patent is automatically granted.
The Patents Journal used to be published as paper hard copies, but for quite a few years now has been published exclusively online, on the ILPTO’s web site. (Long-time followers of the Israel patents scene will recall an abortive attempt by the then-Commissioner to switch to online-only publishing before the statute permitted that, prompting a lawsuit against the ILPTO.)
In my experience, parties that may have an interest in filing an opposition know about the three-month deadline, know when the Patents Journal publishes, and track the progress of competitors’ patent applications through the online database. So they don’t really need to be told when a new Journal comes online. Nevertheless, the ILPTO has made it its practice to send an email to its email list subscribers, notifying them that the latest Journal has come online.
Hitherto, that email has merely noted that the Journal is online, with hyperlinks to the Journal. Then two months ago, someone at the ILPTO decided to add a sentence to the email that mentions when the deadline for oppositions will fall. So the email announcements of the February and March 2021 Patents Journals include an ostensible deadline for filing oppositions. Just one problem: whoever wrote the sentence calculated wrong, and wrote that the deadline fell one month later.
Obviously, an erroneous email announcement can’t foreshorten the statutorily-determined opposition filing period, any more than it can lengthen that period. Apparently the error in the February email went unnoticed, but someone caught the error in the March notice, because earlier this week the ILPTO sent out an email noting that the date in the March email notice was incorrect, and mentioning the correct deadline.
This morning the ILPTO sent out its email announcing publication of the April Patents Journal. It correctly noted that the deadline for filing oppositions is three months from the date of the notice.
But I still wonder: since the people most likely to file oppositions are already aware of the deadline, why mention it at all in the email? We got along well for years without the email announcement telling us when the opposition deadline falls…and for many, many years before that, without an email announcement at all.
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