At yesterday’s cabinet meeting the Israel Government approved restructuring the Israel Patent Office as a closed Agency.
Essentially income from patent, trademark and design application filings and renewals will be ploughed back into the office. The move is expected to increase staff salaries and is part of sweeping reforms and an efficiency drive spearheaded by Comissioner of Patents, Dr. Meir Noam.
The move is welcomed byjunior examiners, and by patent attorneys. However, long serving IPO staff are worried that chnages may adversely affect their tenure.
Until now, Examiners were poorly paid civil servants. This, and the need to get budget approval for every new position has lead to a lack of examiners and poor quality applicants.
All Israel Examiners are required to have science or engineering degrees and many have advanced qualifications. Typically they have poor language skills and rely on the results of foreign examinations of parrallel applications. Since a trainee patent attorney can earn three or four times the starting salary of an examiner, in recent years, quality applicants have not been forthcoming. Those with English skills of the standard required to draft applications are working as patent attorneys.
On the other hand, long serving examiners have been reluctant to retire, and a large percentage of examiners are well past the standard retirement age, with several being over eighty!
Although the move is welcomed, we are concerned that a caretaker government headed by Olmert, a non-elected stand-in for an incapacitated Prime Minister should be passing sweeping reforms in the month before a General Election.
It is noted that Olmert barely scraped into the Likud Knesset list in the last election, and certainly has no mandate for any long reaching reforms. Furthermore, it is by no means certain that yesterdays decision will be implemented by the next government.
