Both the ILPTO’s patent electronic filing system and database are back online. But there’s at least one interesting glitch here.
In the demonstration session yesterday, they explained that whereas in the past, if you missed certain deadlines, the office would eventually send a letter telling you that you missed the deadline and giving you 30 days to respond or they’d close the file (“eventually” in some cases being more than a year after the missed deadline), henceforth we are to get letters warning us that we only have one month left (including any available extensions) to respond.
As a general matter, I applaud this. It’s great to get reminders while you can still take action, and I appreciate the ILPTO doing this.
However, there seems to be a glitch in the implementation of the system. Specifically, in two files, we just received warning letters telling us that we didn’t respond to an OA that issued sometime in 2023, and that we have 30 days to respond to respond to the OA. Except that we most definitely responded in both of those cases, because both cases have been allowed, and we now have to pay the issue fee in each case, in one of them in a few weeks from now, in the other next week.
Giving the ILPTO the benefit of the doubt, I suspect that what happened here is that they want to remind us that the issue fees are due, but the system incorrectly read something and referred to an OA rather than the issue fee.
They get an “A” for effort, anyway.