Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) started Accelerated Examination Program (AEP) in 2009 for a pilot trial in order to expedite the examination of invention patent applications. It is then formally implemented with modifications in 2010 and 2014 to broaden the scope for the applications of the AEP requirements. The current AEP covers the following 4 bases:
- Invention which its corresponding foreign patent application has been allowed after a foreign patent office has conducted substantive examination
- Invention which its corresponding foreign application is still pending before USPTO, JPO or EPO but official action and search report have been issued
- Invention which is required for commercial practice
- Invention which is related to green technologies
In order to encourage applicants to utilize the AEP program, TIPO published AEP statistics each year and the following statistics for 2016 are abstracted from the relevant data released by TIPO.
| AEP cases in 2016 | Base 1 | Base 2 | Base 3 | Base 4 | SubTotal | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AEP cases filed by domestic applicants | 63 | 1 | 140 | 24 | 228 | 420 |
| AEP cases filed by foreign applicants | 164 | 10 | 15 | 3 | 192 | |
| Average time for issuing first examination opinion (days) | 71.9 | 79.9 | 134.9 | 102.5 |
As can be seen from the above, the AEP cases filed by domestic applicants (54%) are slightly higher than that of foreign applicants (46%), and the majority of domestic applicants filed AEP cases with Base 3 while most of foreign applicants filed AEP cases with Base 1. It could be noted that 24 out of 27 cases of Base 4 are filed by domestic applicants, but according to a report made by TIPO in 2016 for analyzing the patent cases of green technology inventions, it is found that 33,505 patent applications in this field were laid-open from 2005 to 2015 with 46% domestic applicants and 54% foreign applicants, and thus the green technology patent filings by foreign applicant are slightly higher than that of domestic applicant, perhaps foreign applicants prefer to use Base 1 rather than Base 4 when filing their AEP requests for inventions pertaining to green technologies. Besides, TIPO took about 2 months for AEP cases filed by Base 1 and 2 to issue their first examination opinion and 3 to 4 months for those of Base 3 and 4. For Base 1 and 2, it is no required to pay the official fee but the applicant needs to provide the acceptance decision or official action documents of corresponding foreign applications when filing AEP request, yet for Base 3 and 4, the applicant must pay an official fee of NT$4,000 but could just provide a description stating the necessity of commercial practice (with an evidencing document) or the relationship/contribution of its invention with/to the green technology invention (with or without evidencing document), so that TIPO still needs to conduct a prior art search and thus the examination time of Base 3 and 4 will be longer than that of Base 1 and 2.
Overall, however, the processing time for TIPO to issue examination results on AEP cases is much shorter than that of a normal invention patent application. Per the processing time as scheduled by TIPO, it will be 6 months for Base 1 and 2, and 9 months for Base 3 and 4 on AEP cases, yet it will be 18 to 36 months for normal invention patent applications depending on their technical fields. Accordingly the applicant could take advantage of this accelerated examination program to obtain patent protection more quickly in Taiwan.
