No, this isn’t a post about Tony Danza, although when I moved to Israel in 1990 it sometimes seemed that the above-named television show was the only thing on TV here. (Now they’ve got a gazillion channels on cable…some people call that progress.) The issue is that although it was known for well over a year that the Commissioner of the ILPTO would be out of a job on January 1, 2011, it was only late in 2010 that the job opening was posted; as shown below in the text of the advertisement (sorry, non-Hebrew-speaking readers, I haven’t gotten around to translating it), the deadline for submission of candidacies was December 16. No word as to why the ministry in charge of this particular job waited until the last minute to post the opening.
Unsurprisingly, no replacement Commissioner has been named as yet. Which is why I got a chuckle out of a letter I saw today that the ILTPO sent to an applicant, informing the applicant that a particular patent application had been deemed refused under section 21 of the statute for lack of response to an OA. The letter was signed by one of the administrative staff “on behalf of the Commissioner”. So was the letter ultra vires?
Apparently not: it seems that the Director General of the Justice Ministry, under the aegis of which the ILPTO operates as the semi-autonomous “patents authority” named himself the interim Commissioner until a new one is found. For better or worse, this probably means there is less oversight going on at the ILPTO right now on the administrative side of things. That’s not necessarily so bad: there haven’t been any pronouncements of new administrative policies for over two weeks, which is a welcome relief from the frenetic pace of administrative policy-making under the last Commissioner. With regard to judicial proceeds (e.g. patent and trademark oppositions and appeals), most things can still proceed apace, as there’s still a deputy commissioner and a hearing officer, both of whom are empowered to deal with most of these matters.
Incidentally, refusals under section 21 are something of a rarity. In the USA, if an applicant doesn’t file a satisfactory response to an OA within 6 months along with any necessary extension fees, the application automatically goes abandoned. Here in Israel the PTO is more forgiving. Typically, applicants get an OA with a four-month response period; then there’s a period of months in which extensions can be obtained “no questions asked” in exchange for a fee; if no response is filed by the extended period, then sometime thereafter (could be a few more months) the ILPTO will send the applicant a letter saying, “respond or we’ll refuse the application”), and only if the ILPTO still gets no response does it issue a section 21 refusal. (For those of you who are wondering, the practitioner handling this particular file assures me that the applicant decided to abandon the application.)