A non-profit Patent Search Center in Taiwan was formed on March 1, 2012 and began operation on May 3, 2012. Its main objective is to provide prior art searches to the patent examiners in order to reduce the backlog of pending patent applications in Taiwan.
This Center is in fact set up by Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) and funded by Ministry of Economic Affairs. In the past years, the patent examiners had to spend much time to conduct prior art searches on patent examination themselves. After studying the model of the Japan Industrial Property Cooperation Center and the Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Services Office, TIPO proposed to set up an outside institute to perform the patent search work as well as the patent classification work for patent examiners.
The Director of Board of the Center is Ms. WANG, Mei-Hua who is also the current Director General of TIPO, and the CEO is Mr. KUNG, Feng-Nung. There are now about 25 people performing the search work and additional staff will be recruited in the next few years.
With the establishment of this Center, TIPO is aimed to shorten the average pendency time for examination on a patent application to 24 months in 2016. In the long term, this Center will serve as a platform to provide a complete patent information system to the industry, government and academic regions.
