America-Israel Patent Law

Israel PTO, Where’s My Patent Application? (System Takes Money but Loses an Electronically Filed Application)

When the Israel PTO moved to electronic filing in June 2016, no one had thought about the importance of providing the filer with confirmation that a filing had been made and what had been filed. Upon discovering this, at least one veteran member of the profession went to Jerusalem and spoke with the senior ILPTO employee responsible for the new system, explaining that that’s not acceptable. The ILPTO’s response was to have the system create a document called an ishur klitat sal – literally “confirmation of reception of basket” – that would be emailed back to the filer, along with copies of the documents submitted, which confirmed that the files were now in the ILPTO’s electronic system.  And a day or two later, one could see those files in the public database.

Admittedly, it’s a clumsy way to do things. The USPTO’s EFS, for example, simply issued a filing acknowledgement, that listed the documents submitted (including filename) and a hash function value for each document, so that one could prove something had been filed if necessary later on. And sometimes there were delays in issuing the ishur klitat sal. But it worked. Filers also had the option of instructing the system to email them an ishur shlihkat sal, “confirmation of sending of basket”, which showed that a group of documents had been submitted.

Additionally, if a fee is involved, the system kicks the user out of the ILPTO’s filing system and into the general State of Israel payment system. Klunky, but that system immediately issues a payment receipt, and since you can’t get to the payment system until after you’ve submitted your documents, one effectively had immediate proof that something had been submitted and a fee paid.

I’ve been writing about these things in the past tense, but the fact is they’re all still true. You still get an ishur klitat sal for everything you file…except for new patent applications. Last year the ILPTO changed to a new system for filing new applications. There are some nice features in this new system (like the ILPTO populating the data fields for national phase applications with data taken directly from WIPO, and the option to have the ILPTO take the specification, claims, drawings and sequence listings directly from WIPO as well). But it has one glaring drawback, and that is that there’s no ishur klitat sal anymore for newly-filed patent applications. And there’s not even an option to send your yourself confirmation that a new application has been submitted. The best you can do is go into the system and see all the applications listed under your account, and check the status of each. If the status is listed as niklat (“received”), you’re good.

I note that even this is wonky: the system lists the date on which the entry was created, the date on which the entry was last modified, and the PCT application number if applicable.  If you want to see the documents that were filed, you have to go into the entry…but when you exist, the “last modified” date will be changed to the date on which you view the entry. Even if it’s an already-filed application and all you’re doing is looking at the data an documents on file.

This led to a new experience this week, one that’s still unresolved.  I filed a national phase application, clicked “submit”, and paid the fee. I immediately got the payment receipt. But no filing receipt was forthcoming. Not that day. Not the next day. Not the day after. So I went back into the system for filing new applications, and found that this application is listed as “draft”. Not “received”, not “transferred to payment”, not “ready for filing”. Draft. As if it was never submitted.

I wrote to the ILPTO about this, and while I was writing this post, received a response in which the writer told me that the application was listed as “draft” and that I should log in and submit it again. I wrote back and explained that the system would still not list the application as “received” because I wasn’t going to pay the filing fee a second time, and that in any event she hadn’t explained how this could have happened.

For now there’s nothing to do, because as I write the system is haywire and won’t us into the “file a new application” or “my filing” interfaces. (We can apparently still do follow-on filings under the old system.)

The good news is the 30 month deadline is still a few weeks away, so we have time to sort this out.

I wonder if the same programmers who work for the USPTO are working for ILPTO.

Follow up, a few hours later:

The new application part of the system came back online.The ILPTO person said that since payment was made, if I file the application that the system has recorded as "draft", it will take the new application and not request money. And that's what happened. I now have a filing receipt for the application. So the system knew payment had been made for this application, even though the application hadn't yet been filed.

Additionally, the ILPTO person said that in the next version of the system, there will be some way to warn people that an application was not successfully filed. That's good, because I wonder what would have happened if I had done this filing on the 30-month deadline - would I have to petition for late national phase entry? I would argue, no, the payment receipt is itself evidence that I filed, and the fact that the ILPTO's computer system hiccuped is their problem.

Anyway, all's well that ends well.

Ivy League Idiots

There have been many videos of “protestors” on US college campuses in recent weeks that display how spoiled – and detached from reality – these students are. There was the graduate student at Columbia, complaining because the university wouldn’t allow food to be delivered to folks who had illegally occupied a building by smashing windows and forcing their way in. There was a similar complaint from a student at Princeton about how, being on a hunger strike, she’s…hungry, and that the university wasn’t doing anything to help her. Then there was another Princeton student complaining that the university health services hadn’t looked into how she’s doing during her hunger strike. And there was another tempest in a teacup when a writer Abigail Anthony released tweets from black Princeton students that had been posted in a twitter feed that had over 1000 members, tweets that make the tweeters look stupid – as if those students expected what they said to be kept private. Don’t ask me how any of these folks gained admission to Princeton or Columbia.

But the statement that I found especially pathetic was the letter from the editors of the Columbia Law Review to the faculty, asking them to waive exams and pass all the students because the students were so upset by the NYPD’s forcible removal of the aforesaid building occupiers that the students couldn’t study.

You want traumatized? How about my wife’s MSc student who lives in Kfar Aza, who was holed up for 30 hours (with her sister and her sister’s two young kids) in the reinforced room in her parents’ house with no electricity, no plumbing and no water, while her father, armed only with a pistol, kept terrorists out – who still managed to burn half the house down? Many of her neighbors, people she’d known since childhood or grown up with, were killed that day.

How about my son and son-in-law, who respectively were supposed to start a master’s degree and second year of undergraduate degree, but who instead from October 8 through 10 were respectively in Kibbutz Beeri and Nahal Oz, and got to see first-hand the burnt-out houses and dead bodies as they were part of the effort to eliminate remaining terrorists? And who were then on reserve duty in Gaza until well into January, and who along with successes in eliminating terrorists saw some their fellow soldiers get wounded or worse? I could understand if either of them said they’re traumatized, but our son-in-law just finished his first semester exams. Our son chose not to start the degree this year, and merely returned to his job at Apple.

What a bummer for those Columbia law students. They, or their friends, chose to take over a university building and then got evicted by the NYPD when they refused to leave peacefully. As far as I know, there were no broken bones, let alone any loss of life. But, gosh, they and their fellow law students are traumatized.

Apparently no one on the faculty explained to those budding future lawyers that when it comes to the job, no one gives a crap about your feelings. During the week of October 8, while still in shock at the killing of over 1200 of my countrymen, I worked on an appeal brief to the USPTO, because we had an inextendible deadline to file it. The brief was in response to bunch of stupid rejections, written by an examiner who’s lazy, stupid, or both.  There were a thousand things besides arguing with a fool that I would rather have been doing that week: helping farmers relocate their crops, returning reservists’ vehicles to their wives, organizing donations of food and clothing. But I set those feelings aside, because my client needed this job to be done.

I’m guessing that by now, the Columbia law students’ exam period is over. If the thought of some scofflaws on their campus being pulled out of a building that they vandalized left them too “traumatized” to take those exams, they clearly don’t have futures as lawyers.

That conclusion also follows from the reasoning ability of these putative legal eagles, which seems mighty deficient as well. They’re living on the Island of Manhattan, and asserting that Israelis are “colonizers”? Setting aside the falsity of the claim itself, if “colonization” bothers them, then they should get out of Manhattan and give it back to the folks that Dutch took it from hundreds of years ago. Otherwise, they’re just whiny, sanctimonious hypocrites. But that point seems to have escaped them.

By the time this is posted, it will be Memorial Day here in Israel. We’ll be remembering the thousands who have fallen over the years in defense of our country, inter alia making sure we have a free and just society. I plan to visit the graves of the local soldiers, including those who’ve fallen in the past seven months, one of whom I personally knew. Sadly, I expect that when US Memorial Day arrives in a few weeks, the Ivy league cretins will still be moaning about how the world owes them an easy life, and about how horrible it is to live in a country that grants them the right to free speech. And that instead of a word of thanks for the soldiers who gave their lives to defend that right, they’ll be at the mall or online making sure to get the best deal in Memorial Day sales.

Let's All Celebrate - Qatar Has Joined the Madrid Protocol!

Well, that seems to be the message from the Israel PTO, which earlier today sent out an email to its distribution list, informing us of this important fact, with a link to the official WIPO announcement.

Of course, Israel doesn't have formal diplomatic relations with Qatar, and Qatar hosts the heads of Hamas who have stolen billions of dollars intended to go to projects in Gaza (while the rest was being put to use building terrorist tunnels and rockets to launch at Israel), but maybe there's some Israeli entity that wants to register a mark in Qatar. I wonder, how would an enforcement action would play out there for an Israeli entity?