Patent

New Patent-Related Official Fees Implemented on January 1st, 2010

The TIPO in recent years promoted various revolutionary changes to patent examination regime, including examination on a claim-by-claim basis, notice of preliminary rejection prior to issuance of a rejection and the interview mechanism. To reflect the increasing costs incurred from patent examination and based on the idea of “user-pays,” the most note-worthy changes are summarized below:

1. Applicants may seek full refund of examination fees by withdrawing patent applications yet to be acted on in writing. For a patent application which an explicit withdrawal in writing is made prior to the TIPO acting on its substance, its examination fee will be fully refunded, to urge applicants to explicitly withdraw patent applications for which the applicants deem to have no commercial values after the requests for substantive examination were made.

2. Examination fee of a patent application is to be computed based on the number of claims to be examined at the time the request for preliminary examination is made. The new fee scheme starts the preliminary examination fee from NT$7,000 (about US$234) (a reduction from the previous NT$8,000, about US$267), which allows examination of up-to 10 claims. See Fee Chart on the next page. Claims in excess of 10 will be computed on a NT$800 (about US$27) per claim basis. The claim fee is also applicable to claims in excess of 10 and introduced during the period of responding to office actions issued during the preliminary examination stage. The re-examination fee, however, remains to be NT$8,000 (about US$267) for a specification having 50 pages or less, with a size fee of NT$500 (about US$17) for each additional 50 pages and a fraction thereof.

3. Annuities are significantly lowered. The annuities for all categories of patents are reduced and the new annuities for maintaining a granted patent in force are as indicated in the Fee Chart on the next page.

The refund of examination fees and annuity reduction took immediate effect on January 1st, 2010; but the new claim fees will only apply to patent applications filed or divisional applications effected on and after January 1st, 2010. For invention applications filed or divisional applications effected before January 1, 2010, the old Regulations of Patent Fees still apply despite that the request for substantive examination is to be filed after January 1, 2010.