For those weirdos who find the Israel patent regulations to be a scintillating topic for discussion (and for those who are just gluttons for punishment), here are a two more points not mentioned in yesterday’s post.
First, in addition to raising filing fees, many other fees are also going up significantly, effective January 1, 2013. Examples: extension fees will rise from 64 shekels per month to 200 shekels per month; the first renewal fee for a patent (through the end of the 6th year) will go from 157 to 800 shekels, and the second renewal fee (for years 7-10) will rise from 320 to 1600 shekels. (Admittedly, that doesn’t come close, in absolute or percentage terms, to raising the re-examination fee from $2500 to $17,000, as the USA recently did.) There will also be a new excess page fee of 250 shekels for each group of 50 claims, or portion thereof, beyond the first 100 pages of the application; sequence listings won’t count, but no word on whether the Israel filing form or the PCT Request (for national phase filings) are included in the page count.
Second, what is most glaring is what wasn’t included in the new regulations: a fee for making a third party request for expedited examination (TPREE). As reported in a previous post here and in a guest post on PatentDocs, statutory amendments enacted earlier this year will allow third parties to request that someone else’s application be moved to the front of the examination queue (and stay there); that provision comes into effect in mid-January 2013. Such requests must be accompanied by a fee, “if such a fee is established”. One would have thought that such a fee would have been included in the latest set of amendments to the Regulations, alongside all the other new and amended fees, but there’s no mention of a fee for TPREE. The Justice Ministry, which proposes the fees, is on record as supporting a TPREE fee of 25,000 shekels; one surmises that the non-inclusion of this fee in the latest group of fees means that the local generic drug lobby – the same group that lobbied for TPREEs in the first place – wants the fee to be set lower (a conclusion confirmed by a source involved in the discussions regarding these fees).
Prediction: there won’t be a TPREE fee in place come January 13, at which time there will be a flood of TPREE requests, all directed to patent applications in the pharma field. At which point the proverbial excrement will hit the proverbial fan, with Pfizer et al. demanding hearings on the propriety of expediting examination in each case, and the Commissioner have conniptions trying to figure what he needs to do. In the spring, after Knesset elections, TPREE fees will be set in the amount of at least 25,000 shekels per request. And a good time will be had by all, or at least by the lawyers who represent the major players in pharma in Israel.