The recent Gowers Review recommended, amongst other things, that the The UK Patent Office should pursue work sharing arrangements with Japan to reduce cross-national duplication of effort. Within only a few months after publication of the review, the Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the Chief Executive of the UK Patent Office (UKIPO as of 2 April 2007) have now signed the Patent Prosecution Highway Pilot Agreement, which should benefit applicants both in Europe and Japan.

This pilot scheme will run for a year from July 2007 and will allow applicants to request accelerated examination in either one of the UK or Japan if they have received an examination report in respect of a corresponding application in the other.

The pilot scheme is intended to test whether such an arrangement, if permanently employed, would make simultaneous patent prosecution in the UK and Japan simpler, faster and more efficient. This would obviously be beneficial to the national patent offices in reducing workload. The system would also be beneficial to the applicant, both in the short term by affording them granted rights faster, and in the long term by fostering consistency between the two offices.

The Gowers Review also made similar recommendations for European Patent Convention states and the USA, and as such this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of emerging international co-operation.

For more information see: http://www.patent.gov.uk/press-release-20070326.htm

In an earlier move, the European Patent Office (EPO) recently launched their Utilisation Pilot Project (UPP) in which European applications claiming priority from an earlier application that has been searched and / or examined and in the UK, Austria, Denmark or Germany are given priority at the EPO.

The national search and / or examination reports are used as a starting point for the examination procedure at the EPO, thus avoiding duplication of effort. For such applications, the EPO aims to provide its Extended European Search Report within 3 to 6 months of filing, a considerable time saving with respect to the present system.

Only European applications filed between 1 April 2007 and 31 December 2007 are eligible for the scheme, and there are additional filing requirements in order to take advantage of it.

For more information see: http://upp.european-patent-office.org/index.html

Phillip Sanger
March 2007