PTO answer..

"The parties appear to agree, and the evidence supports, that Petitioner provided copies of the required documents to a designated representative of Patent Owner in a timely manner. Thus, the statutory requirement has been met."

"We agree with Patent Owner that Petitioner’s service of the Petition and supporting documents to the firm of Thorpe, North & Western failed to comply"

with 37 C.F.R. § 42.105(a). 37 C.F.R. § 42.105(a) specifies that “[t]he petition and supporting evidence must be served on the patent owner at the correspondence address of record for the subject patent.” The correspondence address of record for a patent can be discovered simply by entering the number of the patent into the USPTO’s web-based Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) portal (http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair). Petitioner admits that, rather than serving the address of record for U.S. Patent No. 5,839,108, it served Patent Owner’s former counsel of record, as listed on inter partes review petitions filed by Intel Corp. Opp. 2 ¶ 3. Relying on the notice of service attached to an earlier petition filed by another party in lieu of consulting the Patent Office database to determine the correspondence address of record is not a good faith attempt to comply with Rule 42.105(a).1

doni