Backlog of 150,000 Invention Patents At TIPO

Although the amended legislation had approved an additional manpower of 120 examiners to aid the TIPO, the pendency still climbed to 40 months at the end of 2010 and the number of invention patents in backlog rose to 150,000. It is expected that the number of long-pending cases and their disposal periods will continuously grow this year.

Taiwanese industries had gradually shifted to information technology, medical biotechnology and certain emerging industries such as green energy and cultural creativity. The life cycle of high-tech products is generally only one to two years, while the examination pendency of invention patents may last more than three years. Serious backlogs have impeded business opportunities and industrial competitiveness.
Each year the TIPO receives 20,000 patent applications, much more than the number of annual disposed cases. To prove that the government is trying very hard to resolve the long pendency problem, the TIPO pointed out that in 2009, a total of 23,382 patent cases were disposed, an increase of 42% compared to 16,445 cases in 2008. The TIPO disposed 23,562 cases from January to October 2010, with an increase of 27% compared to 18,494 cases during the same period of 2009. Additionally, by implementing the “Plan for Clearing up Long-pending Patent Cases” in June 2010, a total of 304,700 cases are expected to be disposed by June 2015, which will significantly reduce the number of pending cases to 75,946 and the average pendency will be shortened to less than 24 months.

In this trying period, we highly recommend patent holders make good use of Taiwan’s accelerated examination program, which will effectively shorten the average time from an application being filed to the first office action, and eventually shorten the entire pendency of an invention application. According to the TIPO’s statistics, requests for accelerated examination based on foreign counterparts, i.e. US, Japanese, European or Chinese patent applications, the first office action can be received in an average of 60 days and the allowance rate for an invention patent is as high as nearly 90%. A 60-day quick allowance is even more likely if the TIPO does not uncover any prior art.

To utilize the accelerated examination program for the pending invention applications, the applicant can make a request to the TIPO, expressing the intent to voluntarily amend the claims of the Taiwan application; and upon receiving the notification from the TIPO, amend the claims to conform to those allowed by the JPO, EPO, SIPO or USPTO.