| You said that you contacted the office about filing a European Patent and you were told
to file it direct through the European Patent Office (EPO) and this caused you a lot of difficulties. |
We replied and said that you could have filed your European Patent through the Intellectual
Property Office (IPO). The IPO carries out a number of basic checks on the application and then forwards
it to the EPO. |
| You said why don’t you email applicants a PDF version of their published patent application
or published granted patent before posting and give applicants the option of declining a paper copy. |
We informed you that earlier this year we launched a new service from our external website
where we make GB A and B Patent Publications available in PDF format on the
day of publication please visit the Patents Publication Enquiry pages of our external
website for more details. |
| You said your mark was opposed and we had not dealt with a TM33 correctly and this resulted
in us putting the opponent’s name and address as your address for service. |
We apologised to you and corrected our error. We have also reviewed the TM33 and revised
it to avoid this error happening. |
| You said that the information on the Designs filing receipt was misleading. |
We are looking into this issue to see if the wording of our literature needs to be amended. |
| You said that you had filed 4 patent applications and the claims were almost identical,
yet the search results were different. |
We said that these applications were examined by 2 different examiners. All patents have
since been examined by the same examiner to obtain consistent search results. |
| You said that we should add the agent’s reference to the trade marks notification letter.
You also suggested that the letters produced single sided. |
We told you that for logistical reasons it was decided not to put agent’s reference numbers
on the letters. It was also decided to keep the letters double sided. |
| You said that you were copying classification information from our website and pasting it
into your applications and were surprised that we were raising objections against this classification
information. |
We informed you that the issue is being reviewed by the Classification Section Manager. |
| You said that you did not like the new trade mark search system on our website and found
it difficult to use. |
We contacted you and offered to talk you through the process; You were also sent copies
of the new search pages with an explanation saying that we had made changes to the search to introduce
new functionality that allows searching of images. |
| You said that you had just started filing most of your applications via our website. It
would assist you considerably, if all of our notifications and in particular the electronic acknowledgements
could include in their name/title your reference. You could then download them into the correct client
file/folder. |
We asked you to send us copies of these electronic acknowledgements and these were passed
onto the Finance Manager to review. |
| You said your had a query relating to copyright protection for a book he was writing. |
We contacted you and provided you with a comprehensive answer to your query. |
| You said that a link on our website was incorrect. |
We thanked you for bringing this to our attention and said the error would be corrected
immediately. |
| You said you did not state on the application form that you wanted the mark in colour. You
were now concerned about what exactly your rights were and wondered whether you would have to re-file
in black and white. |
We informed you that in this case it was unlikely that colour would have any influence on
the trade marks distinctive character or the scope of protection and that it was probably unnecessary
to re-file the application in black and white. |
