Part of why we are supposed to be motivated to do electronic filings rather than paper is that the paper application is at risk of mistakes made by Patent Office personnel in processing, while the electronic application papers, once typed correctly by the applicant, should not have errors introduced by the Patent Office.
I am shocked to find mistakes introduced into at least four of our electronically filed applications by Patent Office personnel.
In each case, when we were getting ready to file, we checked the box in ePave stating that we did not want the application to be published. In each case, our Application Data Sheet clearly says "request not to publish."
Despite this, the official Filing Receipt says "Non-Publication Request: No." One of our applications that is not supposed to be published has actually had its Publication Date established. As of yesterday, every single one of our EFS applications in which we specified "request not to publish" had been mishandled by OIPE.
This is Not Supposed To Happen. If I type something correctly in ePave, nobody at the Patent Office should disturb what I typed.
What I have been told, however, is that the Patent Office's handling of electronically filed applications is actually on paper. What is happening is that the Patent Office actually prints out the electronically filed application and then inserts it into the paper flow of regular paper-filed applications. And all the OIPE personnel who prepare error-ridden Filing Receipts for paper-filed applications are apparently being given the opportunity to generate error-ridden Filing Receipts for electronically filed applications.
On one of our recent electronically filed patent applications, I took the time to read further to see what else was wrong in the Filing Receipt. One glaring error is that I (the patent attorney) have had my name listed as the "applicant." I hate to think now what it will take to get inventorship corrected on this application.
The message to be taken home from this is that for your electronically filed applications, you have no choice but to scrutinize each Filing Receipt for errors just as closely as if you had filed the application on paper. More closely, it seems, since the OIPE personnel seem not to be able to interpret EFS printouts correctly, despite the EFS printouts having a repetitive and consistent formatting and presentation of data fields.
News flash! The phone rang yesterday, and someone from the Patent Office has spoken in person to the manager of OIPE about this. The OIPE people are going to be trained so that they know what it means when the EFS filing says "request not to publish." So hopefully this mistake won't happen as often as before.
What should you do about this?
Probably what you should do is go through each of your EFS filings to date, to see whether this same mistake has been made in other cases.
It is fairly easy to identify EFS filings in your docket system since they all start with "09/681." In our office, I simply open Partridge, and then click on the column heading for "serial number" to sort by serial number. That brings all of the "09/681" serial numbers together.
Once you have identified all of your EFS filings, check to see which ones are applications where you requested "not to publish". Then look closely at the Filing Receipt to see if OIPE got it right.
Finally, you need to docket each application where you made a non-publication request, to check later that the filing receipt (a) has been received, and (b) contains a proper acknowledgment that the application will not be published.
This page is http://www.patents.com/efs/filingreceipt.htm.
You can return to the main EFS page.