The Five IP Offices
A new initiative has been set up by the five largest Intellectual Property Offices around the world. “The Five IP Offices” (IP5) is an imaginatively named forum that has been set up to develop and implement ways of increasing work sharing between Intellectual Property Offices. The IP5 Offices are:
- the European Patent Office (EPO),
- the Japan Patent Office (JPO),
- the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO),
- the State Intellectual Property Office of the People's Republic of China (SIPO), and
- the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
The forum has summarised its aims as:
“The elimination of unnecessary duplication of work among the offices, enhancement of patent examination efficiency and quality, and guarantee of the stability of patent right”
The main reason behind the setting up of the IP5 forum is the rising number of patent applications being filed each year at the IP5 Offices. The IP5 Offices account for 90% of all patent applications filed worldwide and for 93% of all work carried out under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). In 2000, the total number of patent applications filed at the IP5 Offices was 987,000. By 2008, this figure had risen to 1,452,000.
The increase in the number of applications being filed has led to a dramatic increase in the backlogs of applications waiting to be examined by the IP5 Offices. In 2000, the total backlog at the USPTO, EPO and JPO alone was less than 950,000 applications awaiting examination. However, this has increased to a current total of over 2 million applications awaiting examination. The IP5 Offices have predicted that if the current rate of increase in the filing of patent applications continues without the introduction of work sharing, the backlog could increase to 4 million in 10 years.
Work sharing between offices would have the advantages of minimising duplication of work by patent examiners and streamlining the patent prosecution process in different countries, thus increasing the efficiency of the patent prosecution process.
Benefits of the IP5 forum which could be experienced by patent applicants include an increased consistency between the results of patent examination in different countries, and therefore of the speed of prosecution, and a reduction in the cost of obtaining patent protection in a number of different countries.
The heads of the IP5 Offices are exchanging proposals to develop an agreed approach for work sharing, and have indicated that specific details required for implementation of the approach should be available by April 2010.
More information can be found on the forum’s recently launched website, www.fiveipoffices.org.
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