The Director General of the Israel Ministry of Justice, Dr Guy Rotkopf, has been appointed acting Commissioner of Patents in place of Dr Meir Noam whose term of office ends on 31 December 2010.
The appointment is temporary, and according to the Chairperson of the Israel Chapter of the AIPPI, is expected to last a mere month until a permanent replacement is found.
It was Dr Rotkopf who announced that the first publication fee collected by the Israel Patent Office for publishing basic bibliographic details of new Israel Patent Filings in the Official Gazette would be refunded to Applicants, after instead of publishing details in print, Dr Noam decided to make do with the faster, more user-friendly and vastly more ecological publication on-line in the Israel Patent Office database. I wait with bated breath to see whether a month in office will be sufficient for Dr Rotkopf to come up with a satisfactory implementation of this refund, since there must be about 25,ooo applications requiring such a refund, which I estimate will work out as less than $50 per application, with approximately half of these to Applicants from abroad. Personally, I think retroactive legislation to allow publication on-line or creative interpretation of the term publication would have been a more satisfactory approach.
More interesting is the composition of the appointment committee which is unknown, even to applicants apparently, presumably in the cause of transparent government. Most interesting is who will be the next Commissioner, after Dr Rotkopf’s caretaker term???
Another question that this curious blogger asks himself: I understand that Dr Noam took a summer holiday and went incommunicado for about a month during the summer when the courts were in recess. The walls didn’t come tumbling down. If a replacement is expected within about a month, why bother appointing a temporary commissioner, instead of having the Deputy Commissioner serving as acting commissioner in the interim?
Another thing I am interested in is what Dr Noam will be doing next? No doubt we’ll know soon.
