Five IP Offices should build "Speedway" for patent examination

Lately, the five IP directors from China, the United States, Europe, Japan and Korea gathered in Guilin, a city of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to discuss patent examination. On April 14, Vice Minister of U.S. Department of Commerce and the United States Patent and Trademark Office David Kappos expressed that, when giving a lecture in Peking University School of Transnational Law (Shenzhen), the five IP offices should build a "Speedway" for patent application since all of them faced the same problems, i.e. the fast growth of patent applications and the overstock of patent filings to be examined.

According to the statistics released by World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the five IP offices harvested 80% of the global patent applications. However, the long examination period of patent applications becomes a universal problem for each country in the world. Based on what Kappos said, in the United States, the average time for one patent examination is nearly 3 years and for some patent applications in technologic field, the period is even longer.

Kappos introduced that, for each year, there are 250,000 patent applications in need of the examinations of at least two IP offices of the five. "For example, the commodities manufactured and distributed in China are probably sold in the United States. Therefore the commodity need patent application in these two countries. To reduce the repeated work among the five IP offices, raise the efficiency and quality of patent examination, the five IP offices began to think about the cooperation in patent examination from the year 2007. However, the fact is that each does things in his own way and the repeated work still exists at present." Kappos hoped that the five IP offices could build a sharing mechanism to shorten the period of patent examination.