| You said you were unhappy with a patent opinion published on the IPO website. |
We said we thought the “opinion” was impartial. If you believed that the opinion was incorrect
you could ask for a review and there was still the option of complaining to the Parliamentary Ombudsman.
The IPO was unable to agree to your request to withdraw the opinion from the website because the IPO
did not have the legal power to withdraw an opinion once it had been issued. |
| You thought that details of your patent had been seen by a third party without your prior
knowledge and wanted this apparent breach of security investigated. |
We said that it was extremely unlikely that your patent had been seen by a third party and
we explained the security measures that were in place. |
| You said that you were unhappy with: the fees the IPO charged for copies of granted patent,
the fact that when contacting the IPO the first greeting is in Welsh and also that the CEU record all
incoming telephone calls. |
We told you all about the fees charged for copies of certain documents. If the greeting
in Welsh was confusing our customers then we will consider changing the greeting. We follow strict legal
rules if customer’s calls are to be recorded and the IPO complies with these rules, any new customer
is informed immediately that phone calls are monitored and recorded for training purposes. |
| You said you were unhappy that a Hearing Officer refused your application because it lacked
novelty and your appeal to the High Court was also turned down. |
We said there were no further routes of appeal the courts confirmed that the application
lacked novelty. The IPO cannot do anything more. You were told that if you were still dissatisfied you
could ask your local MP to take up your complaint with the Parliamentary Ombudsman. |
| You said a number of documents were sent with the search report, unfortunately one abstract
that was listed in the search report was not sent to you. |
We said the process of sending out abstracts with search reports was looked at carefully
to try and find out the root cause of this problem. However, the exact cause of this error was not established.
A memo has been send to all of the Examining Groups to remind all examiners of best practice when sending
abstracts with any search reports. |
| You said you filed a patent application for the Internet in the early 1990's and felt that
other parties were now infringing your patent. |
We gave you a summary of the patent process and recommended that you sought legal advice
from a patent agent. You were told the IPO offered an Opinions service which would give an opinion on whether your patent
had been infringed. Infringement action could be lengthy and
expensive and we recommended
you consult an
agent before starting infringement proceedings. |
| You said you were unhappy because we had not responded to your letters. You were also aggrieved with the Hearing Officer's decision on your 4 patents. |
We said that your case would be reviewed and any outstanding correspondence would be dealt
with immediately. The Hearing Officer had maintained objections to all four applications, although they
felt that one of the applications could be acceptable,
with a few amendments.
You were told
there was a time limit to deal with these amendments if you wanted to proceed with this patent. |
| You said you were unhappy that we abandoned your application. |
We said it was our practice to contact customers before abandoning their application and
this was not done in this case. We apologised for this oversight and confirmed that the application
would be reinstated. |
| You said you were not given important information relating your trade mark and you felt
that your application was not dealt with correctly. |
We investigated your case and agreed that it could have been handled better. You should
have been advised of the new law relating to relative grounds and the effect this would have on your
application. We apologized for the way that your case had been handled and a Team Leader would be contacting
you immediately to help to progress your application. |
| You said that you wanted to be told details of a particular trade mark and made a freedom
of Information request. |
We said we could only give you limited information, as the mark had been withdrawn before
it was published. Under the 1994 Act, case related information such as the examination report etc cannot
be made available for public inspection. |
| You said you were unhappy with the time it was taking to progress your application. You
had been told on a number of occasions that the trade mark was ready to be published yet the status
on our website showed that it was still at the examination stage. |
We apologised for the undue delay and unprofessional way that the office had dealt with
your application. We gave you a date when your trade mark would be published and a brief outline of
the publication and opposition processes. We informed you we would learn lessons from this issue to
enable us to provide higher standards of customer service in the future. |
| You said your application had been published and was coming towards the end of the opposition
period yet it had a “Progress Delayed” status against it on our website. This status implied that the
progress of the application was being delayed and the opposition period was being extended, when this
was clearly not the case. |
We said that this status had been given to the application because there was an outstanding
classification issue to be resolved before the mark could be registered; this issue has since been resolved.
We have no powers to extend the opposition period and accepted that the use of this status could be
misleading and changes are being made to clearly explain that the use of this status has no effect on
the opposition period. |
