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The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) in Taiwan is facing with a significant backlog of patent applications, and their expected volume of patent applications under examination during the years from Year 2011 through 2016 is as follow (please see below):
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| Year |
2011 |
2012 |
2013 |
2014 |
2015 |
2016 |
| No. of Cases |
159,540 |
156,060 |
136,590 |
114,550 |
91,040 |
72,320 |
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In Year 2010, the IPO announced and has implemented a plan for cleaning up the significant backlog of patent applications (the "Plan"). In order to implement the Plan, the IPO has taken the following actions, among others:
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In Year 2010, the IPO hired 60 new examiners and these examiners, after receiving training, started to handle patent examination work.
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In August 2010, the IPO further hired another 97 technical clerks with "R&D military substitution service" status (all of them are taking the compulsory military service and all of them received at least master degrees in various technical fields), and these 97 technical clerks started to carry the responsibility for "patent search work" (so as to reduce the search workload of patent examiners).
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The IPO started to recruit 170 patent examiners with a service contract of 5-year term and the IPO will soon additionally recruit 70 technical clerks with "R&D military substitution service" status so as to expedite patent search work done by the IPO.
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The IPO has formed a Patent Search Center to move the patent search work to the search center and let patent examiners to focus on their time on substantive examination work.
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In addition to the Accelerated Examination Program (AEP) in place since Year 2010, as of September 2011, the IPO started to implement the Patent Prosecution Highway based on its agreement with the USPTO. As of March 2012, the IPO will further implement TW-Support program ("TW-Support Using the PPH Agreement") under which the IPO will act as the OFF (Office of First Filing) under its PPH agreement with the USPTO.
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With all the efforts and actions taken and to be taken by the IPO is for purposes of cleaning up the backlog and expediting examination of pending patent applications, according to the IPO's business plan, the total number of patent applications for which they would conclude examination is as follows:
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| Year |
2012 |
2013 |
2014 |
2015 |
2016 |
| No. of Cases |
44,480 |
60,470 |
63.040 |
65,510 |
60,720 |
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As compared with the number of cases (for which the examinations are concluded) for the previous years (please see the data below), the increase of office actions and decisions issued by the IPO since last year is very significant and we expect that the increase will continue to be at least in the same ratio (if not larger) for the next several years.
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| Year |
2008 |
2009 |
2010 |
2011 |
| No. of Cases |
15,700 |
23,382 |
28,526 |
36,580 |
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According to the date released by the IPO, for each of the years from 2009 to 2011, the average annual number of patent cases with office actions/decisions issued by each patent examiner is 89, 105 and 110 respectively. However, due to the shortage of manpower, the number of patent cases with office actions/decisions issued in Year 2011 is still less than the number of patent cases for which substantive examination requests are filed in the same year (43,500 cases), which makes the total number of pending patent cases to become 160,318 cases and which makes the average length of time for concluding the examination of a patent case to be "45.12 months". Nevertheless, after all the manpower support action plans taken as of Year 2012, the IPO expects that, for Year 2012, the total number of cases concluded would be 45,000, and, until end of Year 2016, the average length of time for concluding the examination of a patent case to be "within 24 months".
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Although patent applicants would like to see their patent applications be examined as prompt as possible, they also need to face with the situation that much more office actions will be issued for their patent applications within the same time period. Lee and Li are trying to take all possible measures to make the best adjustments of our manpower and recruit more talented patent staff experts, so that we can handle our clients’ patent cases in a timely manner and the quality of our services will not be affected.
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