In order to speed up the examination process of invention patent applications, Taiwan Intellectual Property Office began Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) program in 2011 with foreign patent offices. For an invention patent application of identical contents filed in both Taiwan and a foreign country of United States, Japan, Spain, Korea or Poland, the applicant may file a PPH request with TIPO for their invention patent application by using the relevant material of the corresponding foreign application if it has one or more allowable claims after examination.
The following statistic are PPH requests as filed with TIPO from 2011 to 2017:
| PPH bilateral agreement | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TIPO - USPTO | 39 | 252 | 271 | 321 | 327 | 343 | 542 |
| TIPO – JPO | - | 208 | 493 | 515 | 523 | 455 | 471 |
| TIPO - SPTO | - | - | - | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| TIPO – KIPO | - | - | - | - | 6 | 20 | 14 |
| TIPO – PPO | - | - | - | - | - | - | 0 |
From the above table, PPH requests in Taiwan were mainly filed by applicants from United States and Japan. PPH requests per TIPO-USPTO agreement steadily increased each year, and reached the highest percentage of 58% in 2017, while PPH requests per TIPO-JPO agreement had the highest filings in 2015, but decreased by 13% in 2016, followed by a slight increase of 3.5% in 2017.
The following is the average time for TIPO to issue examination results for PPH requests, up to the end of December 2017:
| Average time for issuing the first examination opinion | 53.9 days（1.8 months） |
| Average time for issuing the examination decision | 130.4 days（4.3 months） |
Since PPH agreements require that the claims of Taiwan patent application must sufficiently correspond to those of its foreign application, and most documents are accessible online from the foreign patent office, TIPO can conduct the examination significantly faster than that of a normal patent application. Therefore, if an invention patent application has met the PPH requirements, the applicant is encouraged to file a PPH request with TIPO in order to obtain patent protection more quickly in Taiwan.
