The Israeli patent registrar have reverted previous ruling regarding patents on software and published a draft for the procedures to accept such patents. The procedures are open to public comments for the next 30 days.
Two years ago the patent registrar have started to consider revising the the issue and got many position papers (e.g. Hamakor’s papter). At the end he decided not to accept patents on software. De facto, at least one such patent (US patent 7,596,609) was accepted to be valid in Israel after that ruling. Now that the rulings is reverted, I guess will see many more software patents granted here. I wonder about the implications on the local software market… hopefully it won’t stagnate due to patent wars such as the ones we see every now and then in the US.
Free Software Universe 
Very sad 😦
Lior, What can be done? to prevent this. please advise.
At the moment I’m not sure what can be done. Trying to get some press coverage to show the problematic aspects of this decision.
Hi Lior,
The pragmatic thing to do, I think, is to try to minimize the damage.
If you look at the examples in the document you linked, you can see that the registrar is intending to accept American-style interpretations: He gives examples for one totally abstract idea (Tracing Compiler) and two cases of business methods which he thinks should be accepted because the business method uses a computer network. It is these which we need to attack — both in the press and in an official comment (after all, the document is a draft published in order to receive public comments).
Who can we contact to just ask that there will be no respect of software patents?
It’s a bit too late, as the registrar flip the decision done by his predecessor. I guess you can always ask him to reconsider, but I think that’s futile at the moment.
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