The patent offices of Europe and the US have begun an experiment designed to increase the speed at which patent applications from one area are processed in the other.
A planned Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) has gone live in a one year trial that will help European Patent Office (EPO) applications skip the queue at the US Patents and Trade marks Office (USPTO) and vice versa.
"The Patent Prosecution Highway will leverage fast-track patent examination procedures already available in both offices to allow applicants to obtain corresponding patents faster and more efficiently," said a statement by the EPO. "It also will permit each office to exploit the work previously done by the other office and reduce duplication. In turn the initiative will reduce examination workload and improve patent quality."
The PPH is designed to allow someone whose patent has been awarded in one of the offices to receive quicker treatment at the other, as well as to enable the second office to use the material produced by the first.
The EPO said that the scheme would be a year-long trial at first. "The EPO and the USPTO will evaluate the results of the pilot programme to determine whether and how the programme should be fully implemented after the trial period," it said.
The USPTO said in a statement that applications that qualify for the PPH process would jump almost to the top of the queue.
"Once the request for participation in the PPH pilot program and special status have been granted to the US application, the US application will be taken up for examination by the US examiner before all other categories of applications except those clearly in condition for allowance, those with set time limits, such as examiner’s answers, and those that have been granted special status for “accelerated examination.”," it said.
It said that the EPO agreement was like the first PPH that it agreed, which was with Japan, except that applications under the Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT) would be excluded. The PCT allows for a process which makes it easier to make several international patent applications.
The UK already has a PPH with the US and with Japan, while the US has PPH agreements with Japan, Korea, Australia and Canada.
When the UK's PPH with the US was announced a year ago the then-parliamentary under secretary of state for intellectual property and quality Lord Triesman said that the principle underpinning PPHs was that there would eventually be many of them.
"The PPH helps both offices in their goal of stimulating and rewarding invention and innovation and is a further step towards a global patent prosecution highway network," he said.
"Our collective goal is to reduce duplication of work, speed up processing, and improve quality," said USPTO director Jon Dudas at that time, saying that his office wanted to build "a more rational international patent system".
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