Government Expands Scope of Accelerated Patent Examination

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) has expanded the scope of application of the Accelerated Examination Program (AEP) this year in order to speed up the patent examination procedure. An applicant may request accelerated examination if an examination opinion has been obtained from a patent office in the United States or Japan or from the European Patent Office, and if proof of business necessity is provided. TIPO points out that the concept of patent protection is widely accepted today, resulting in a great increase in patent applications. To speed up examination of the constantly growing number of cases, TIPO brought in the spirit of the international Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) system in 2009, permitting application for accelerated examination for patent applications in a foreign country that have received approval for substantive examination from the patent office of that country.TIPO reports that the AEP has achieved excellent results in its first year. It has been applied in an average of more than 70 cases per month, reducing the time required for patent application from the usual two to three years to just six months. Now TIPO has expanded the scope of AEP to include cases for which corresponding applications have been submitted in the U.S., Japan, or Europe but have not yet completed the approval process there, so long as the notification of examination opinions and a search report from that foreign patent authority have been produced.If no corresponding patent application has been submitted overseas, or if such application has not yet been approved by the foreign patent office, the applicant can still apply for AEP by producing documentary evidence (documents showing that a licensing agreement is already under negotiation or has already been concluded, photographs showing that the product is already in production, or that it is included in a product catalog, etc.) sufficient to prove the commercial necessity of accelerated examination.