The Patent Office asked me to post this information. My comments follow.
From: William.Stryjewski@USPTO.GOV To:
Subject: 10 meg byte Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 17:39:08 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) X-UIDL: 914376087 An application which is greater than the 10 Meg EFS limit can be submitted on CD under the special provisions of EFS for applications of that size. The date of filing the application can be either the date of submission of the application to a US Post Office or the date of receipt of the CD package by the USPTO. By the provisions of 37 CFR 1.10 (Rule 10), the USPTO will give a filing date to an application submitted to the US Post Office when Express Mail is used, and the procedures of that regulation are followed. If the filer uses regular mail or any other carrier, then the submission will be treated under 37 CFR 1.6 and the date of receipt of the CDs at the USPTO will establish the filing date. This procedure will be explained more fully in an addendum to the Legal Framework to be posted soon. William Stryjewski SIRA/EFS Primary Examiner 703-308-2707
You might ask, what's this all about? Here is my best guess.
Traditional (paper-filed) applications may be filed under Rule 10, so that your filing date is the date you (Express-) mailed the application at the Post Office. The filing date is the date you sent it, not the date it was received.
In contrast, the EFS documentation states that the filing date for an electronically filed application is the date it was received by the Patent Office in Virginia, and the date on which you sent it is irrelevant for filing date purposes.
But of course, if your would-be EFS application turns out to be larger than 10 megabytes in size, the Patent Office's EFS server will refuse to allow you to file it electronically. So what are you supposed to do? According to the EFS instructions, you are supposed to "burn" the EFS-formatted application onto a CD-ROM and send the CD-ROM to the Patent Office. That's fine except that the EFS documentation says that an EFS application isn't filed until the Patent Office receives the application. This guarantees your filing date won't be until tomorrow or the next day, and indeed guarantees you will never get a filing date if the package is lost or stolen on its way to the Patent Office.
It means, in plain language, that no sane practitioner would ever file via CD-ROM. Better to print out all ten megabytes on paper and get a couple of people to help you carry it to the Post Office, and send it via Express Mail.
Well, the announcement above from the Patent Office says that, contrary to the EFS documentation, you can simply take the EFS CD-ROM over to the Post Office and send it via Express Mail to the Patent Office, and it will get today as a filing date.
This page is http://www.patents.com/efs/cdrom.htm .
You can return to the main EFS page.