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Wednesday, July 19, 2006

E-Business at OHIM.

Mr. Martin Sick Nielsen of

AIPPI has published his

Report on the 13th Meeting of the OAMI Users' Group held on July 03, 2006, in Alicante, Spain. Of particular interest for me is his statement on OHIM e-business:

"[...] The Office is having a continued strong focus on the development of its e-business solutions. As of the date of the Users' Group meeting e-payment and e-opposition filing (of the opposition form with exhibits) are available, and the Office has a substantial number of both improvements to existing services and new services in the pipeline.

The NGOs argued that some e-business solutions, such as e-filing, seem to have been developed with the individual user and not the professional user (whether in private practice or in industry) in mind. Use of the e-filing service by professional users, thus seem to be driven rather by the reduced fee for e-filing than by an improved efficiency as compared to paper filing.

On this basis, the NGOs prompted the Office to accelerate the development of a B2B e-filing service, which has been in the pipeline for quite some time.

The Office informed that it has defined a so-called TMXML standard for B2B e-filing the technical details of which are available on its website. B2B e-filing is thus available, and the Office is further working with a number of IPR software solution providers (Patrix, Dennemeyer and CPA Software Solutions) to develop integrated B2B e-filing solutions in the systems of the providers.

Such solutions are in test but have proven difficult to develop, and the Office urged the users to persuade their IPR software solution providers to give priority to the development of these solutions. [...]"

The e-filing service of OHIM as available now appears to be clearly less than satisfying. It is made up of a JavaScript-overburdened series of HTML pages with forms to fill in application data. Trying to use other terms for goods and services than as preferred by Euronice is a pain. If you are very lucky you will reach the final submission confirmation page without encountering a browser crash or at least some JavaScript troubles. BTW, no checks for your identity (authentication) are provided. You can pretend to be whoever you want. For now I do not intend to go more into the details of the numerous security flaws of this service.

As also percieved in conjunction with some e-filing projects of other Offices, the main and often single objective thereof is to create internal savings for the benefit of the Office by eliminating costs otherwise caused by the necessity of keying in or OCR-ing paper forms supplied by or on behalf of the applicant euphemistically called "customer". And, in view of a fee difference of EUR 150,-- for each filing, they are not so unsuccessful in convincing users to use e-filing:

(German filings - Source: Alicante News)

An XML based alternative sounds good provided it is an open standard not specific to any particular IT platform. There is no need for another platform specific "Microsoft-Windows only" approach. And, I don't know why they have not yet posted the technical details of TMXML on the OHIM website. Or should I have overlooked something? The

search box on the OHIM website does not reveal a single document on this topic.

And yet another footnote: TMXML appears to be frequiently used to denote the XML format of TeXmacs documents. It is also used as an acronym for Tonight's Menu Extensible Markup Language. Perhaps OHIM should re-think its terminology so far.

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Patent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

E-Business at OHIM.

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