Nowadays Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) program is commonly seen and implemented by many countries as a fast-track examination for patent offices to share their examination results and thus speed up the examination process. Currently there are various types of PPH program including a regular PPH, PPH-MOTTAINAI, PCT-PPH and GPPH (global PPH). Taiwan began PPH program with US in 2011 by utilizing a traditional and regular PPH, and then extended the PPH program to sign bilateral agreements with Japan in 2012, Spain in 2013 and Korea in 2015, which all belong to the MOTTAINAI-type of PPH, in order that the applicant could file PPH request with the examination results from either of the patent offices who signed the mutual PPH agreement.
Recently Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) released the following PPH statistics from 2011 to 2016. It shows that the majority PPH requests are filed by applicants from US and Japan, so far there are 1553 cases based on PPH agreement between TIPO and USPTO, and 2194 cases based on PPH agreement between TIPO and JPO, in which the former has a steady and positive growth since 2011, and the latter though has a positive growth for 3 consecutive years from 2013 to 2015 yet with a minus 13% in 2016 as compared with 2015.
| PPH Agreements | Starting Date | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TIPO - USPTO | 2011/9/1 | 39 | 252 | 271 | 321 | 327 | 343 |
| TIPO - JPO | 2012/5/1 | - | 208 | 493 | 515 | 523 | 455 |
| TIPO - SPTO | 2013/10/1 | - | - | - | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| TIPO - KIPO | 2015/7/1 | - | - | - | - | 6 | 20 |
| Source: Taiwan Intellectual Property Office | |||||||
In addition, since PPH requires that the claims must be sufficiently corresponding to those as allowable or granted by the other patent office, TIPO could process PPH cases within a quite short period. Namely, TIPO just takes an average time of 1.5 months to issue the first examination opinion and 3.2 months to issue the examination decision. Also, it is of no need to pay official fee when filing PPH request, and TIPO could obtain most of the examination documents online from the signing foreign patent office.
In fact, prior to PPH program starting in 2011, TIPO already implemented Accelerated Examination Program (AEP) in 2009 till now, so that foreign applicants could provide search reports and examination results from their corresponding foreign applications to accelerate the examination of their same invention patent applications in Taiwan. Therefore for foreign applicants from those countries which have not yet signed PPH agreement with Taiwan, they could still obtain patent protection of their corresponding application faster through AEP request.
