Newsletter
PATENT AND TRADEMARK PRIORITY CLAIM PRACTICES SINCE WTO ENTRY
The ROC (Taiwan) is not a signatory to the Paris Convention, and therefore mechanisms for claiming patent and trademark priority under the Paris Convention are not available in Taiwan. The Patent Law and Trademark Law however provide that an applicant may claim priority at the time of filing a patent or trademark applica-tion in Taiwan, on the basis of reciprocity. Be-fore Taiwan acceded to the World Trade Or-ganization (WTO) on 1 January 2002, various countries had established reciprocity arrange-ments with Taiwan as the basis for priority claims.
On entering the WTO, Taiwan extended its re-ciprocity for priority claims to all WTO members, so that priority can now lawfully be claimed for any patent application (invention, new utility model or new design patent) or trademark ap-plication. However, the priority date so claimed may not be earlier than 1 January 2002.
To further clarify the certain for related practice, on 27 November 2002 the Ministry of Economic Affairs announced the following:
When a national of a WTO member files a patent application in Taiwan, priority may be claimed if the priority application was filed as an interna-tional application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) or European Patent Convention (EPC) with any designated country that is a WTO member, and if the application is deemed to be an eligible national application according to the domestic laws of the designated country.