BY KUKU

In considering recent national economic policies and in response to the wide range patent practices throughout many advanced countries, the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) has held a series of public hearings and expert meetings, and recently come to the conclusion to revise several stipulations.

As is well-recognized, a priority date is a crucial point in time separating previous conventional technique from new inventive concepts, and thus is the key criterion for the Examiners to find prior arts before the priority date and then to examine a patent application in order to determine whether the patent application is novel or inventive over the prior art.

However, priority date may sometimes be unduly neglected due to reasons such as time differences among different countries or any undesired events that cause said priority date to unintentionally lapse, and thus many promising applications are unable to claim adequate protection in countries other than the county in which those applications were originally filed.

In order to create more favorable environment for foreign applicants seeking a remedy in response to the abovementioned circumstances, the stipulation (i.e. Article 28³) that ultimately decides the fate of an application in Taiwan claiming an international priority is projected to be revised in order to extend a statutory time period of claiming a priority from twelve (12) months to fourteen (14) months. In other words, any subsequent application filed in Taiwan that claims an earlier-filed foreign application as a priority which has unintentionally lapsed, within two months after the statutory time period (i.e. 12 months), will still be accepted. Of course, a corresponding petition fee has to be paid in order to claim such remedy.
 
So far, the above remedy to be implemented is applicable to Invention (Article 28), Utility Model (Article 28 applicable mutatis mutandis under Article 120), and New Design (Article 28 applicable mutatis mutandis under Article 142) patent applications. As for New Design applications, the statutory time period for claiming priority is projected to be revised from six (6) months to eight (8) months and, of course, a corresponding petition fee need to be paid in order to claim such remedy.