Recently, the Five IP Heads Meeting was held in China to meet the rapid increase of patent and trademark applications and challenges faced due to the backlog of pending patent applications. Five offices are the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO), European Patent Office(EPO), Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). These offices receive the largest number of the patent applications in the world, and it is therefore necessary to seek for ways of coordinating and standardizing the examination and grant.
Because of the backlog caused by the insufficiency of the examination, it becomes a common issue that the pending period of a patent application is delayed. For example, in the United States, it takes about 3 years before a patent is granted. Some applications take much longer time..
Due to the globalization of the world economy, it is clear that one patent application is to cover other countries or regions. It is said that there are at least 250,000 patent applications each year worldwide cover the 5 countries/region. Products sold in the Chinese market are most likely to be sold in the US market. Patent is therefore applied in both countries. This is why it is becoming more and more important to eliminate the repetitive work and improve the efficiency and quality of the patent applications.
It is learned that the cooperation was first launched among the 5 office in 2007. As a matter of fact, the patent highway is already in existence between USPTO and JPO.
