Taiwan, US Launch PPH Trial

11 September 2012

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) launched a Patent Protection Highway (PPH) program on September 1, 2011, for a trial period of one year. Applicants of invention patents that are first filed with USPTO and later filed with TIPO claiming priority to corresponding US applications and have requested for substantive examination (but where TIPO has not issued the first examination reports on the applications) may submit a request for accelerated examination with TIPO, provided the examination result from USPTO contains at least one claim determined to be patentable and vice versa.

TIPO’s own Accelerated Examination Program (AEP) allows applicants to apply for expedited examination with approved US applications, says Jaw-Hwa International Patent & Trademark & Law Offices in Taipei. “On the other hand, the PPH pilot program requires the applicants to amend their scope of claims with TIPO to be the same or narrower in scope than the claims approved by the USPTO, and all subsequent amendments must also satisfy this requirement. Therefore, applying for expedited examination under PPH is stricter than that of AEP which will result in a more efficient and faster examination.”

Jaw-Hwa lawyers note that if invention patent applications in Taiwan do not satisfy the conditions for applying for expedited examination under PPH, the owner may still take advantages of the AEP system to expedite the examination instead with a copy of Notice of Allowance and claims to be or have been granted and published in a corresponding invention in any foreign country, which mostly occur from the United States, Japan, China or the European Patent Office, according to the statistics published by TIPO.

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