IPO – an electronic revelation!

There is good news for patent attorneys in India- the Indian Patent Office (IPO) is going electronic!

Sounds good right! There have been series of meeting that have been talking place between patent agents and attorneys in the Delhi Patent Office. There must be such meetings in other three Patent Offices at Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai as well, but I am not sure so I will not commit or comment.The meetings involve discussions about substantive law and as well as things such as the stereotypical objections raised by the IPO in the first examination reports (FER). But this is topic for another day and for the present I shall restrict myself to reporting the electronic revelation.

The Controller Mr. BP Singh in the meeting on February 2, 2007 unveiled the prototype of the electronic filing system for patent application filing as well as updating other information and documents pertaining to the patent application. Some of the salient points are-

(a) The online filing by the patent agents and attorney, which obviously saves the time to gruelling travel to Dwarka;

(b) Immediate generation of fee receipt. Thus there is no longer the “conventional” paper letters requesting for the fee receipt;

(c) Immediate issuance of application number to the patent application;

(d) Creation of account for the patent attorneys and agents to pay the fee online;

(e) Issuance of FER by electronic means and no more hand written paper FER;

(f) Replies and responses to FER can be electronically uploaded or sent to the Examiner / Controller

These are few of the features which are apparent and have been communicated. There are drawbacks also such as what happens if the sever of the IPO is down and it is a last date case or a priority application filing. Another concern for patent attorneys and agents is the time limit to submit the fees. The Controller did not give a clear answer if the fee has to be paid by six in the evening or till midnight. After all if the system is electronic then the priority would be for the “day”, not fixed for a particular “time”. A solution would be the bringing back of the provision of filing fee within a month after submitting the documents. The popular reason given is that this provision of one month is being misused as people are filing divisional applications without fee and if the parent application is accepted, then they do not pay the fee. There is a remedy to this; for divisional applications make it mandatory that the fee has to be given to IPOP and if it is not given then the parent can be revoked.

Another aspect is the amount of data that can be stored which has direct impact on the speed and connectivity to the IPO server. These are probably being address within the IPO, but I am always sceptical about how things work beyond the red tape.

In any case, without being overly pessimistic, we must look at the bright side that this is a big advance for the IPO to be going electronic and genuine efforts of the IPO should be commended. After all half the battle is won when the intentions are good.