The IP Factor

Under Section 17c of the Israel Patent Law 1967, a patent that has issued from one of a list of examining patent offices deemed as having an appropriate standard, may be used as the basis for allowing a corresponding Israel patent application without substantive examination as to novelty, inventive step, unity of the invention or enabling disclosure. Under the stewardship of current commissioner, Dr. Meir Noam, the list of patent offices considered as having adequate examination procedures has been extended to include:
Austria, Australia, Denmark, the European Patent Office, Germany, Japan, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. In a Patent Office Circular, Dr. Noam has extended the idea to include claims allowed in written opinions of the PCT, which is somewhat problematic as adequate disclosure is not something usually related to at all.
Anyway, in a surprising move, Dr. Noam has decided to remove Australian patents from the list of allowed patents that can be used as a basis for invoking Section 17c.

We view this development favorably since the Australian Patent Office does not have the most solid examination procedures. In practice, this development is unlikely to have many ramifications since it rare that Section 17c is invoked on the basis of Australian patents anyway.