Thank You @Oamitweets for 2014

It is the season for writing thank you letters so now that the holiday season is drawing to a close, I was thinking of writing a SOLO thank you letter to OHIM for the challenge of their new website.
It was a great idea. We applaud the concept of electronic business. Some of us may have dusted off the fax machines and given up the unequal struggle of finding the right button to press to record or pay or limit or surrender our client's marks. Nevertheless there are some smart error trapping reasons behind all those buttons. You cannot oppose an International mark too soon  or partially surrender a pending application. You can now submit your Grounds of Appeal and taking over representation is simplicity itself. So for the result we thank you.

I am sorry that despite the long holiday period from 24 to 31 December announced in 2013 and today 1 January 2015 more recently announced,  that someone or something was still working. Over the dies non I have received alerts, search reports, renewal confirmations, notices of advertisement and the dreaded surveillance notices. None at least on 25 December so at least some holiday may have been observed.

I am surprised that there are still bugs lingering but OHIM website weekend works still seem to be a regular occurrence with the last advertised for 20 December 2014

It would be nice if 2015 saw some stability so we can get to grips with using it without things changing under our fingertips.

One of the bugs that annoys me is this. I want to edit the name or address of one of my owners and that helpful little message comes up that I have circled. It says "Please note: if you have provided a correspondence address you may also want to update it" but does it let you? No. Sucks boo, the correspondence address stays greyed out as does the Country of your address, whichever address that might be. Its been frustrating me for a while now but its not something I want to phone the customer support line about. I just leave the correspondence address. Its a bit of a legacy anyway now that the applicant is using e-comms and a representative.

It is fairly unusual for a company to want to use an address in another country, but it can. Since we have a European Union you might expect a company occassionally to want to run its business from elsewhere in the Union. While in the UK, our law requires a company to have a registered office address within the country of incorporation, the trademark does not need to use that address. I suggest to my clients that they do, but some prefer to use their business address instead. 

Or maybe a Scottish company might want Scotland to be there as their country. After all for a Scottish company that is where its registered office needs to be.

It seems that OHIM regard a change of country as a transfer but of course the transfer department do not see it that way and will not record a change of address on a transfer request. So sorry to bore those of you who have never had a client who wants to trade from another country, but this seems to be the most convenient way of  raising my concern.

Maybe "Owners" is one of the areas that the IT team are still working on. Mysteriously the number of Owners now in my User Area is much depleted. Ah you see OHIM loves to keep us on our toes. Lets just hope they keep moving in the right direction during 2015.

Happy New Year!

Is a Fax Machine Essential ?

It appears that my co-blogger is planning to move office and to that end she has been busy working out what needs to be done. I am hoping that she will share with us some of the useful information she gathers in this exciting process.

She asked OHIM whether it was still necessary for representatives to provide a valid fax number for communications. She reports that they said No.

Today I had rather late instructions to file an appeal. It should have been the simplest task to enrich OHIM with 800€ from my deposit account and say that the grounds would follow later. Barely 5 minutes work really. OHIM even provide a very detailed note of how it is supposed to work. Sadly that is not how it does work, due to the delights of the OHIM website.

I really mean it

Once upon a time if you logged into your dashboard and selected a mark, it would be opened in a new tab after asking that infuriating question about whether you wanted to be told that ever again. I have lost count of how many times I have said I don't want to see that message again. That's not the bug I am concerned with.

The bug is that having arrived  in my new tab the header says I am logged in but the record says I am not. The bug seems to be temperamental as its sometimes there and sometimes not. Maybe this is due to the time I have been logged in? To me it seems just to appear to annoy me when I am trying to achieve something.

Now having got to my record there is a button to appeal but it wants me to upload the form. I am a smart bunny, I know where OHIM have hidden the link to the forms at the very bottom of the home page. You can also find a link in that very detailed note. If you are reading this because you have work to do (and a typewriter) here is the link to the Appeal Form.

OK you have the form and you download it and fill it in in Acrobat Reader. Oh no of course you cannot save it, but you can print it and scan it. Now it would be easier just to fax it but I have not got a printer and a fax to hand at the moment. I do however have a full licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat  so that should be simples. I can fill the form and save it and then attach it to the e-communication. No. I fill it and save it but when I attach it, its blank except for my signature. No information on the deposit account I want to take the fees from, no indications of the appellant and the decision. All just blank. Why? It looks just fine on my PC. I try to print it using a pdf printer but the security defeats me again and generates an error message as if I was trying to print a picture of some currency rather than spend it.

All I am doing is a standard obvious action that OHIM should have tested many times. It is months after the website was launched. They tell me how to do it in their tutorial but it does not work that way unless you are prepared to use a typewriter or a fax machine or scanner.

So Sally I am sorry they misled you but I strongly recommend you get yourself a little USB fax modem from Maplin so you can send faxes from your PC. This is the one I have and its a bit of a bore to plug it in instead of the phone but it should work (I hope) or this appeal ain't going to be filed. Just as well I don't leave things to the last day but even so post wouldn't work either.

So come on OHIM its bad enough that I must appeal but at least take my money without quite so much pain. I may cry.

Go Mobile with the EPO on your holidays

Just in time for the summer break the EPO has brought forth its mobile site so you can keep in touch while away from your patent files. I was alerted to it by this tweet asking what I thought so I had to try it.  First off I picked up the aged iPhone and browsed to www.epo.org and got the usual desktop site.  I went back to the source material and read it again and this time I arrived at a nice clean launch page.

Who is this site for? initially I thought that I as a n agent was the target market, but clearly I am not. The selection of pages suggests that the media and prospective examiner recruits are the target markets. The job site is particularly good. Nevertheless the rest of this review is based on the utility for the professional agent market.

Now I had just received an email from a client assuming that £500 would cover their next renewal fee so the first thing I thought I would do was check the real fee to see quite how far he was adrift. I spend a lot of time clicking through to the fee schedule on my desktop. Law & Practice was a good option but then I ended up at my familiar schedule in an unreadable scale. Never fear I had passed another link to fees on the European Patent Convention page, this offered me the Fee amounts and codes and here they are. Even after turning the phone round, no fee amounts were available to me.

Since the announcement admits that a lot of things are not in the mobile site, I thought that perhaps News was more likely to be useful and it was. I could read that so I marked it as a favorite page. I did that by touching the star and then the "Add to favorites" option that then appeared. Touching the middle symbol next to the star takes you to the menu. You guessed that, sorry.

Sometimes if you scroll down to the bottom of the page there is an option to share the topic and tweet a link to it. You could also share with your friends on Facebook, your colleagues on LinkedIn, Jane who is the only person I know who uses Xing, or the barren planes of Google +. Whether that option appears was a bit random or so it appeared to me.

For most of the material on the incredible resource that is the EPO website, you do need a bigger viewing and reading screen so this iPhone test is perhaps a little unfair. Having a good readable presentation of the legal resources that works on a tablet (but not necessarily something as small as a phone) would be useful. So the things I would most like to be able to read are the Guidelines and recent cases. The register would be helpful too. What price to read it on Google Glass? Maybe the developers can leave that horror for another day unless I can wear GLASS TM at a hearing and use voice commands to amend and then print the amended pages of my patent specification. 

Coming back from that fantasy, I would like the site to know what browser I was using and adapt to that. I don't know how that's done, but someone must have tried to patent it (I hope you refused it). OHIM made a big song that their site was accessible on all formats, so perhaps they will share.

As a final note and because I have been so cruel to OHIM about the frustrating shortcomings of their new website, I will finish this post by advertising one of its best features, the selective search window that lurks at the top of the screen. You might have thought it just searched the site, but activate it by clicking on the magnifying glass and drop down the hidden list to the left of the search box you can get straight to the register or any of the other databases without once being asked about opening another tab

Do share your opinions of what the EPO is doing in the mobile world.