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The 2001 amendments to the Patent Law took effect on 26 October 2001. In addition, the 1997 amendments to the law took effect on 1 January 2002. In response to the entry into force of these amendments, and also to relax certain restric-tions and simplify application procedures, on 6 November 2002 the MOEA announced amendments to the Enforcement Rules of Patent Law. Their main points are as follows:
After a patent agent is lawfully appointed, all acts of the agent within the scope of the pow-ers granted to him, should have the same legal effect as actions of the principal. A patent application may be signed or sealed by the agent alone, and need not be signed or sealed by the applicant in person.
An applicant’s personal identity document, or document evidencing its corporate status, need only be submitted if the patent authority deems it necessary and instructs the applicant to do so.
In principle, all application documents should be prepared in Chinese, and where they are in a foreign language, Chinese translations should be submitted. But in the case of evi-dentiary documents with respect to application documents, a full or partial Chinese translation needs be submitted only if the patent authority deems it necessary.
Evidentiary documents submitted in accor-dance with provisions of the Patent Law or its Enforcement Rules should be submitted in the original or master copy. But if the party con-cerned is unable to provide an original or master document, a reproduced copy may be substituted if the concerned party declares it to be identical to the original or master docu-ment.
Where any page is missing from the patent specification or drawings submitted by the applicant (this is not the same as failure to submit a specification or drawings), if the missing item is supplemented by way of amendment and the supplemented portion was already disclosed in the priority application submitted at the time of filing, the date on which the specification and drawings were originally submitted may be taken as the date of full submission of documents so that the filing date will not be affected.
Simplified requirements are introduced for methods of disclosure in claim, drawing de-scriptions and drawings of a new design patent application.
For a guidance of applicants when submitting various types of applications, the documents to be submitted for each type of application are separately listed.
The matters to be made public when laying open an invention patent application are ex-plicitly stated.
The matters to be published in the official patent gazette are explicitly stated.
The method of calculating a priority period as referred to in the Patent Law is stated.
In the interests of clarity, it is explicitly stated that where the Patent Law refers to periods running "from the day following the filing date," the first day of such period should be the day following the filing date as defined in Ar-ticle 23 of the Patent Law.
