Customer feedback - October to December 2010

Compilation of informal complaints made by our customers during the period of October to December 2010. The complaint received is listed in the first column. Read across the row to find out our response and any additional measures taken.
Informal Complaints Response and additional measures taken
You sent us an email asking when we were going to inform you of your renewal payment for your patent and how much you have to pay. You complained we don’t remind you before it is due. No response necessary afterwards as we discussed this with you on the telephone at the time.
You are, "Unhappy with the offices procedures for sending out patent renewal reminders two weeks after the renewal due date. Although the timescale allowed two weeks in which to pay the fee without incurring additional costs, your renewal payment was received late and as such incurred the late penalty payment fee of £24. You would like your patent renewal reminders to be sent out well in advance of the renewal due date." We replied, "Thank you for your telephone call and subsequent payment of £24 received 16 November 2010 for the renewal of the above mentioned patent. I appreciate your comments and understand your difficulties about our procedures for issuing renewal reminders. However, it was decided to issue reminder letters two weeks after the end of the month in which renewal is due following consultation with a wide range of our customers and members of the IP profession. This ensures that patent holders who have not paid the renewal are reminded within sufficient time to maintain their rights. It also reduces the number of reminders we need to process, as we only contact those customers who may have overlooked the payment. Our statistics show that on average; approximately 95% of renewals are renewed in the three months before the due date, and for that reason we have no immediate plans to change our practice. However, we will keep your comments in mind when we next review the patent renewals system. Finally, I can confirm that we have renewed your patent for the 12th annuity; please find enclosed the certificate of payment together with fee acknowledgement for your records. I have also enclosed our official list of fees for future reference. Should you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact me."
You told us, "I am 93 years old and have served The Army, Diplomatic Corps, and even now serve on Health Boards and Police Complaints Services. In other words I have served this Great Country and its former Empire for 80 years. I still rise at 05:00 each morning and assisted a young lady next door with snow clearance today to ensure she could get to work in the MOD. Imagine my shock when I telephone the Patent Office (IPO is a distortion of the proper name of that great institution) only to find I could not obtain the information I required to form a Patent for my new thawing invention for pipes and other plumbing via something akin to micro surgery. It could be a life saver for the Nation if I could file immediately. A bit more back bone is required of Public Servants. Walk to work and do your bit for the prescribed period then walk home. I once marched in full pack for several days and nights in the Sudan and at the end of that march wiped out 300 of so waring natives with only 23 comrades. Why? Because we were serving King and Country for the benefit of the people back home. Please buck up your ideas and staff your Office properly for the statutory hours you are meant to open. Work is a privilege and should not be taken lightly by the current generation. Too many namby-pambies!" We replied, "Thank you for your e-mailed dated 20 December; a copy of which can be found below. We decided to close our office on Monday 20 December due to the severe weather conditions which made our site roads unsafe for staff. We have a duty of care to our staff which we exercised on this occasion. I am sorry for any inconvenience this caused you."
You said "Your website is by far the worst and most confusing I have ever visited. We tried endlessly the search of patents. Sheer rubbish. A few years ago this was great. Have never seen such a crappy effort. I suppose this must generate a great deal of folk paying £750 for you to wade through this junk." We replied, "Thank you for your recent feedback on our website. I am sorry you found it so confusing and difficult to do what you wanted. We take all feedback seriously and will bear your comments in mind when making future changes to the site."
You told us, "The form FS2 didn't make sense, not clear English. Name, number or other identifier." You felt that the forms weren't in clear English. We replied, "You felt that the section headed Name, Number or Other Identifier was unclear and not in plain English. We explained the purpose of that part of the form and you were content with our explanation. However you felt that the wording on the form needed to set this out more clearly. We have taken on board your comments and will review."
Your IT people and service provider should be sacked. I know many people who have been trying to use your service since the weekend and the length of time your online services have been down is unbelievable in this day and age. We replied, "Thank-you for your e-mail in relation to our website disruption. Please accept our apologies for the service disruption you have experienced. On Saturday we were subject to an increased Distributed Denial of Service attack on our website. The attack was conducted by a group called Operation Payback who campaign against major anti piracy groups. They say that they targeted us because we are perpetuating the system which is allowing the exploitative usage of copyrights and intellectual property. This issue we experienced was unprecedented and does not fall within the usual criteria of service denial attacks. We do have adequate scope and protection to deal with normal and to some degree excessive malicious attacks on our website, both our IT department and the IPO service providers mitigated a vast amount of the attack however this attack was a fully engineered and organised protest. Further measures have been put in place in the last few days specifically engineered to deal with the problem in the future but again I apologise for the disruption caused to you by this."
You required SAS to search part of an early screening on the possibility to patent a technology requiring significant development investment. You confirmed that the response you received was too limited to be of interest. You also commented that the expert searcher has "respected the contract": find bar to patentability. But, as the examiner mentions in his response, "The above documents appear sufficient to anticipate or render obvious the invention in a broad respect but may not anticipate or render obvious the invention when restricted by specific technical features." You would have expected a longer list to help him navigate between known techniques. You confirmed that your response to scale below is rather dissatisfied with regard to your expectations. In addition, and it may be related, the delivery was quite late (summer holidays?), and you feared the expert searcher may have completed this assignment under higher time pressure than usual. That said, the listed patents were absolutely relevant, and that shows a good understanding of the technique. Typical alternatives are the commercial services of the various Nordic Patent Offices, the Swiss one, or his self. Our response (from the Lead Search and Advisory Service examiner) stated, "Thank you for completing the feedback form that we sent you. This has been passed onto me to look at in light of the response that you gave. Firstly, I am sorry that you were not totally satisfied with the service that we provided on this occasion. I have spoken with the examiner who carried out the search, and it was agreed that we could indeed have provided more information about relevant documents in this field in our original search report. As a result, she has revisited the results of her search, and amended the report to include some further documents, probably less relevant than those cited in the original report, but which could still be of interest to you and/or your client. I hope that you find this amended report useful. In relation to your comment about timeliness, please note that our usual targets are to provide estimates within 3 working days of request and the final search report within 10 working days of a customer's request to proceed with the search. I note that both the estimate and the search report were issued within these timescales. It is sometimes possible, if the examiner has spare capacity, for the search to be done faster than this if required. In the future, therefore, if you do want the results faster than our usual 10 working day turnaround, then please do let us know and we can see if we can do this for you. If you have any queries, or to the amended search report provided, then please do not hesitate to contact me. Once again, please do accept our apologies for not fully meeting your expectations on this occasion, and I hope that you will consider using our services again in the future. Customer’s response: Thank you for handling my feedback in such a professional fast manner! Clearly, this experience has had me review my opinion on the use of SAS for quite "open" searches as I saw this one, half freedom to operate, half potential for patentability - and your acknowledgement helps me feel that I may expect more material another time. Without getting back to detailed dates, my comments on delivery delays took into account a first notice professionally communicated by your services that it would be advisable for me to wait 2 weeks for the return from holiday from your expert searcher - instead of designating another person -: having done so, I was then expecting some faster confirmation from your side. Please note no further action to be taken, the customer appears to be happy with the offices response.
You advised, "I am writing to you as the obvious lack of ability in your offices means that telephone calls are not effective. I posted a patent application form to your office in July 2010 and have heard nothing, this was I believe a form requesting an application if that helps. I telephoned your offices a month ago and a young lady traced my form and confirmed it had been received on 29 July 2010 and that the requested form would be send to me within the next 2 days. Well, we are at least a month later and because I trusted the girl I have destroyed my receipt of postage and am now up the creek for proof. So I am hoping that we have a genuine case of an error being made and a delay as a result of it or that my application has been lost in order to delay the priority date for my invention allowing someone else to copy the idea and file an application form ahead of me and as I have filed patents before I am aware of this problem. I have a copyrighted version which protects me back to July if needed in courts but I am hoping that the British Patent Office is above these types of practice which is rife in other countries. My Invention is "The Hoke" referenced to AD 20 10 and my full details are as follows: If it is not possible to find my original forms then I would be obliged if you would forward me a complete set for re-submission but I would also wish to have the priority date installed on my application to the date confirmed by your personnel as being the 29 July 2010." We responded, "Thank you for your emails. I am afraid that it will not be possible to backdate your patent application as you suggest. For a patent application to secure a filing date it must generally include at least three main elements: (i) an indication that a patent is sought; (ii) the applicant's name; and (iii) something which appears to be a description. I am afraid that the Office has no record of any correspondence from you in July 2010. Furthermore, it appears from your emails dated 6 October 2010 and 9 November 2010 that the documents you initially attempted to file only included a form, with no description. I believe you have since spoken to a colleague of mine in our customer relationship team, telling him that you filed a description and two drawings. However, despite a thorough search based on the information you have provided, we have not been able to locate these documents. I note that you have since filed an application through our website. However, this application did not include a description, so a filing date has not yet been secured. I would advise that you file your description and drawings as soon as possible, inserting your application number in the top box. To submit the description and drawings electronically they will need to be saved as PDF files. If this is a problem then you can file the documents on paper or by fax (01633 817777), but you should quote your application number to ensure that the documents are placed on the correct file. I regret that we are unable to backdate your application as requested, but hope that you find this information useful nonetheless." On the 23 November 2010 you advised, "I will fax them over tomorrow and contact your colleague, it is difficult, for me at the moment to get everything correct but I will try and make sure this is done."
You needed to speak to security section where they receive patent online applications about a fax you sent them on the 3 December 10 about an error on the filing. Nobody was there to help at 16:00. This is the third complaint we have had in the last few days. We contacted you by telephone to discuss further. We confirmed that we had written to you about the errors in the application and you were happy about this.
You advised, "Completing Form 1 for an online patent application. I received 3 blue warnings having clicked on the summary button. I clicked on the first and was able to make the correction (I'd omitted the country of one of the applicants) but clicking on the second and third blue warning did not enable me to make the correction. It took me back to the right page (contact address) but did not let me enter contacts first and surname." We responded, "Thank you for your e mail about the patents web filing service. We think the situation you described in your e-mail occurs when a Legal Applicant i.e. a company name has been entered at step 2 and these details are used as the Address For Service details at Step 3. In this situation at Step 3, the First Name & Last Name fields are disabled, so it's not possible to edit them. This is because the Company Name is being used as the Address For Service. When you get to Step 13, (the summary screen) warning messages are displayed with hyperlinks back to Step 3, asking you to enter a Contact First Name & Surname. When you click on these links you are returned to Step 3, but the contact First Name & Surname are disabled, so it is not possible to enter these details. This is because the AFS is the Company Name. Clearly, the warning messages and hyperlinks back to Step 3 are not appropriate in the situation outlined above because you are still not able to provide the information we have requested (and it is not necessary for you to do so in these circumstances). Although it is possible to ignore the Warning Messages and continue from Step 13, we have decided to stop these warning messages appearing in these circumstances and will make the required software changes as soon as we can. We are grateful to you for bringing this issue to our attention as we can take steps to change the service in order to make it easier to use in the future." On the 11 November 10 you responded to say, "Many thanks for acting on this."
You were unhappy that an application did not have your details on it. We replied, "Thank you for your e-mail dated 23 November 2010 and addressed to Mr Ron Marchant. The international patent application, to which you refer, PCT/GB2009/001121, was filed at the Intellectual Property Office in its capacity as a Receiving Office for the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. The patent application is currently proceeding through the international phase and will very shortly enter the national phase in whichever countries the applicant has chosen, provided the necessary requirements for entering the national phase in each of those countries are met. At this stage, the international application will become separate national applications in those countries. The application was filed in the name of Peter Karl Neath and your e-mail was the first indication received at this office that any error may have occurred. The PCT Request Form (PCT/RO/101) includes a box entitled "Further applicant(s) and/or (further) inventor(s)" and so the option was available for a second applicant to be named on the request form at the point of filing the application. It is now too late for a correction to be made to this application during the international phase, as the latest date for any such corrections was 7 November 2010. After this date any such requests must be made directly to the national intellectual property offices in the countries where entry into the national phase has been made. In the UK, such a request must be made by the current-named applicant or agent (this is important as it is not possible for a third party to request a correction to someone else’s patent application without their agreement). The request should be made directly to this Office as soon as the GB application number is known. If the applicant is not in agreement with you about your entitlement to be named as a joint applicant, then entitlement proceedings may be more appropriate. In this case separate proceedings would need to be launched in each country where entry into the national phase has been made. In the UK, entitlement proceedings may be initiated before the Comptroller at the Intellectual Property Office. Further details on the inter partes hearings procedure is available. Before launching such proceedings, which can be very costly and time consuming, I would urge you to consider reaching an agreement with the current-named applicant or considering mediation (one of the benefits of mediation is that it can resolve disputes spanning several countries)."
You sent an e-mail withdrawal letter on 1 October 2010. As you were not named as the applicant the agent was telephoned to confirm it was a bona fide request. A confirmation of withdrawal letter was sent via the agents. However, the agent has invoiced the application for taking the phone call and forwarding the withdrawal letter. You are more annoyed at the agent but feels we should have told him that the letter would go to his agent. We confirmed that we would change procedures so that if customers send a withdrawal letter and they have an agent formalities will issue a response e-mail to the customer advising that the confirmation of withdrawal letter will still go to the agent. You did not want us to confirm this to you and just wanted us to note your comments
You stated, "The most important thing about trademarks and understanding them is to find existing trademarks and what classes they're in. The most important thing people want to do on your website is a TM search and it's too hard to find the TM search facility! I've have been to this website many times and it takes ages to find it and on this visit I give up - I can't find TM SEARCH to the casual visitor if you made it CLEAR on the TM homepage you'd be more accessible friendly and USEFUL. You're blocking most visitors who are timidly probing into this area and are biased in favour of attorneys who know what they're doing and exactly what they want from this site. Also the self-registration is hard to follow and all the options and technical terms - too hard!
For example what the differences between the types of registration when someone wants to register say in 3 or 6 classes and the price differences? What do you get and what do you not get?"		 We replied, "We are currently running a project to review the Trade Mark pages of our website. Your feedback is particularly timely and important and we will definitely look at the Trade Mark search facility and make access to it much clearer and obvious. It is hoped that all pages will be updated early in 2011. If you have any specific views as to where you would expect the link to trade mark search to be I will take your views on board. Finally, many thanks for your feedback; it has proved very useful to us."
You said, "I have just been online as I was about to send a batch of 91 TM50’s (Applications to Register a Licensee). I have been working from a TM50 that I had saved from previous use, as my broadband service has been down so I didn’t go online to check for any changes. I was shocked to see that the ‘Nil’ payment for lodging a TM50 has now been raised to £50 since April 2010. There is absolutely no possibility that my company can afford to pay this extortionate fee just for registering a licensee. Do you offer any majorly discounted fees for companies that need to register a large number of licensees in one batch? I can’t tell you how disappointed I am, especially as I have just finished filling in 91 TM50’s that I am now going to have to abandon. Can you explain why it should be a £50 fee per TM50 when it is literally a matter of entering a name and address onto our file? I can understand if a Nil fee was raised to £5.00 per form, but a jump from a Nil payment to £50 is ridiculous and makes it impossible for me to register the licensees that I should be able to register very easily. This simple process should be able to be done by myself using an online service - I shouldn’t have to pay to do something so simple, and I should be able to do it myself online. I would appreciate your response to explain why you feel it is acceptable to charge such an extortionate fee for something so simple." We responded, "Thank you for your e-mail of 8 December 2010. I am sorry to learn of your concern about the £50.00 fee that was introduced in April 2010 for registering a licensee. I should explain that this was one of a number of changes made to Intellectual Property Office fees in April. The background to this is explained in the consultation document PDF document(786Kb) which was published on 20 July 2009. I have also attached the formal response document PDF document(49Kb) to the consultation which summarizes the replies we received and the decisions we made in light of them. I appreciate that both documents are lengthy and so for ease of reference, I would advise that the issue of introducing a fee for recording registrable transactions, such as licensees, is set out at proposal 7. I am afraid that we do not offer a discount for bulk filing of registrable transactions. I hope you find the above information useful."
We made a Section 3(1) (b) and (c) objection to your mark, since it is purely descriptive of the services applied for. You rang on the same day and expressed your surprise at the objection, which we explained to you. You then e-mailed us an image of your mark with a logo that you are using with it. We responded the next day advising you that the logo mark too was unlikely to succeed if you applied for that one. You then rang back today and somewhat aggressively declared that you had wasted £100, TM application was a money-making exercise and a rip-off. You would be posting your thoughts on the Internet.
Regarding the form DF2A, you did not understand how many sheets you needed to write on the application form. You wanted to know why we would put the ADP number on there. You also stated that the limitations or disclaimers were not clear on the application form. We responded, "On the designs front, we reassured you that your application would be examined within the next couple of days. On the specific issue of filling in the form DF2A, you said that you thought it was unnecessarily complicated. When we explained that you didn't need to fill in all the boxes as some may not apply (ie the ADP number box), you felt that was not sufficiently explained and as a novice to design applications you thought that every section needed an answer. We agreed we would take your comments on board for any future review. On some wider matters, when we mentioned contacting us on the 0300 number, you said you had never come across a 0300 number before and wasn't sure to call it in case it was a premium rate phone line. You had also received a postal survey from us which required you to put a stamp on to the response. You didn't think this was right. We just agreed to note these comments."