Recently, the statistics from SIPO show that up till October, 2016, SIPO accumulatively received over 20,000 applications for evaluation report on design patent rights.
The system of evaluation report on design patents is a new supplement in the third amendment of the Patent Law of People’s Republic of China which came into effect on October 1st, 2009. The number of evaluation report application has increased year by year since July, 2010 when SIPO started to accept evaluation report applications. There were respectively 33 applications in 2010, 390 applications in 2011 and 6,032 applications in 2015. By October of 2016, there were 7,004 applications.
It took 5 years for the number of applications for evaluation reports on design patent rights to reach 10,000, whereas it only took 14 months to reach another 10,000. This shows that as a beneficial supplement to the preliminary examination of design applications, evaluation report on patent rights were gradually accepted by the public.
