It has been a long year practice that foreign applicant may file a patent application in Taiwan by using a patent specification in foreign language in order to obtain an earlier filing date; and at a later designated term, the Chinese specification must be supplemented with the Taiwan Intellectual Office (TIPO).
To determine which foreign languages may be used in a patent specification, TIPO held several public hearings in this regard, and finally it announced the implemented regulations on July 3, 2012. Kindly refer to the below for highlights pertaining to such regulations:
- Specifications may be in the following foreign languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
- If specification in more than two foreign languages are used to file a patent application, TIPO will recognize the first filed foreign language specification unless the applicant wish to claim the latter as the specification to be used for its patent application; under such circumstance, the filing date of the Taiwan patent application will be based on the date when the latter foreign specification was filed. If the two or more specifications in foreign languages are all filed on the same date, TIPO will notify the applicant to choose only one within a designated term, and in the absence of a reply, the Taiwan patent application will be dismissed.
- The foreign language specification used in filing for an invention patent in Taiwan, shall contain at least one claim, plus the necessary drawings, if any. As for filing an utility model application, the foreign language specification shall include at least one claim, and also with the drawings. Then as for filing a design application, the foreign language specification shall include the title of the design, and drawings.
- An applicant is not allowed to use patent gazette or priority document directly as its foreign language specification when filing for a patent application in Taiwan.
In addition to the above, although specification in foreign language will be recognized by TIPO for filing a patent application, yet amendment to said specification will not be permitted. Per the Patent Act, the amendment of specification refers only to amending the specification in Chinese; therefore, once the foreign language specification was filed at time of filing the patent application in Taiwan, the same could not be amended. If the amendment of the foreign language specification is submitted to TIPO, it will be kept in the file wrapper as reference.
