Those of us old enough to remember Bill Cosby before he fell from grace will recall his famous bit about Noah. It actually appeared on an LP as three separate sketches, the second of which was "Noah and the Neighbor". Noah's neighbor complains to Noah about the ark-under-construction blocking the neighbor's driveway, and eventually the neighbor asks, "Why do you need to build this ark anyway?" To which Noah replies, "I can't tell you, haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa".
Last week I paid the "acceptance fee" (the equivalent of the USPTO issue fee) for an allowed Israel patent application. This morning I received the equivalent of a US "issue notification", namely a letter telling me when the application will be published in the Patents Journal for opposition purposes, which is what constitutes "acceptance" of the application. A picture of the letter appears at the right.
For those who don't read Hebrew, I'll translate the relevant part:
"The date of acceptance of the application is
"The notice of acceptance of the application per section 26 of the statute will be published in the Patents Journal which will be available on the Patent Office web site on ."
Thank you Noah!
My working assumption is that when they switched from publication of the Patents on the last working day of the month to the first working day of the month, someone was supposed to reprogram the software that generates these letters, but screwed up.
While this seems funny, there's actually a serious side to the story: if an applicant wants to file a divisional application, he must do so BEFORE publication of the parent case in the Patents Journal. So knowing the date of future publication can be important. Especially since there's no case law in Israel akin to Immersion Corp. v HTC like there is in the USA: if you wake up one morning and find your application published in the Israel Patents Journal, the Israel PTO's e-filing system won't let you file a new divisional, and you'll need to go to court and hope that the court rules that a divisional can be filed on the same day that the parent case published under section 26.
I also like the fact that the letter is signed by "The Patent Office" (or more accurately, "The Patents Authority"), without any particularly individual's name on the bottom to contact about the fact that the letter is wholly uninformative.