TIPS^®  Taiwan Intellectual Property Special

Announcement of “Pre-Examination Processing of Patent Applications, Patent Examination Standards Part 1”

The TIPO announced the standards for “Pre-Examination Processing of Patent Applications, Patent Examination Standards Part 1” on May 17, 2005 and started implementing the same on May 20, 2005.

The standards set out the relevant standards for the scope of the pre-examination processing, documents required for obtaining a filing date or for recordation of changes, acceptable formats of documents, contents of the patent specification, handling of amendments submitted for patent applications and issued patents, withdrawal of patent applications, calculations of deadlines and extensions, documents required for instituting invalidation actions and services of Official Actions or Notifications.

In the past, the various standards for the pre-examination processing were set out as “internal rules” within the TIPO and were only known by the general public as “practice carried out,” rendering difficulty for the general public to follow and resulting in many disputes between the patent applicants/patent attorneys and the TIPO. To resolve such dispute, this is the first time that pre-examination processing of patent applications is incorporated into the Patent Examination Standards, which will serve a definite basis and clear guidelines for the general public in filing of patent applications, submission of relevant documents for patent applications and recordation of changes.