The Israel patent office has issued new procedures for patent prosecution.
Notice Prior to Examination
In response to the Notice Prior to Examination, applicants are required to provide a list of relevant prior art including details of citations in corresponding applications in other jurisdictions. Non-patent literature should be supplied in full. Patents cited in the background of the specification do not need to be listed again.
Applicants are also required to provide a full list of corresponding patents and applications in other jurisdictions.
Where there are more than 50 claims, the claim set must be amended or excess claim fees must be paid.
Finally, the first publication of the invention must be reported and failure to do so will be considered as a requirement not met and may invalidate the patent.
Amendments
It is now no longer necessary to submit marked up and clean copies of amended pages during prosecution. Claim amendments should be made by submitting a full set of marked up claims, whereas only amended pages to the specification need be submitted. These amended pages should be marked as {application number}/2, {application number}/3, etc.
On allowance, a complete, clean copy of the patent as allowed should be submitted together with the issue fees.
Comment of the author
I see the logic and approve of the new procedure for making amendments.
Apparently, the new procedures follow a meeting with representatives of the professional organizations. The head of the association of patent attorneys, Dr Meir Noam, is the previous commissioner and does not practice opposite the patent office and hasn’t done so for about a decade. The head of the AIPPI Israel Chapter is a litigator. I therefore wonder to what extent the changes take into account the professionals that prosecute opposite the patent office.
Author: Dr Michael Factor, Patent and Trademark Attorney
IP FA©TOR – Israel’s International Patent and Trademark Attorneys
Israel
http://blog.ipfactor.co.il
