With Increase of Patent Examination Personnel Proposed, Amendment to the Intellectual Property Office Organization Act Passed Preliminary Deliberation for Legislation.

To solve the difficult situation of increasing pending patent applications and long pendency period for examination, on June 3 Executive Yuan approved the amendments to Articles 7, 16 and 17 of the Act of the Organization of Intellectual Property Office proposed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs.  Once the amendments are ratified, the patent examination human resources will increase and so will the quantity of examined patent applications and, therefore, long-pending patent applications may be cleared up and pendency shortened effectively.

In addition to the version of amendments approved by the Executive Yuan, the Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statues Committee of Legislative Yuan also approved the motion for relevant amendments proposed by the legislators upon its preliminary examination to increase 170 staff of fixed-term appointment and 39 assistant patent examiners.

The essential points of the version approved by the Executive Yuan are specified as following:

1. To deal with distinctive nature of the patent examination, a great number of staff with science and engineering background and experience is required.  Therefore, without altering the present total organic quota, the quota of assistant patent examiners is increased and that of clerks and secretaries reduced by 39 personnel.

2. Deletion of the restrictions about the proportional deployment of employees from the personnel quota of various organizational positions and the 20% upper limit of employment rate as defined in the first paragraph, Article 7 of the said Act.

3. To relax the upper limit of personnel quota of part-time patent examiners.

The other alternatives include the addition of 100 R&D substitute service draftees dedicated to patent search as of August, and establishment of the IPR Center to allocate 20-30% of its annual revenue from official fees as the source of patent fund dedicated to paying expenses for future employment of patent examination personnel after expiration of the fixed-term appointment staff.  Also, peripheral corporation(s) or organization(s) might be incorporated in the future to help conducting relevant patent searches in order to accelerate the examination period.

Short of staff, it takes an average of 36.8 months before completing examination of patent application, and there have been over 140,000 long-pending patent applications so far.  In terms of applying the current alternatives for clearing long-pending patent applications, 101,300 patent applications might be examined from 2010 to 2012 if the personnel remain the same.  However, as there are about 40,000 new patent applications filed per year and for a period of three years, the number of new patent applications will amount to 120,000.  The examination of a new patent application will be lengthened to 46 months by the end of 2012.  If the amendments pass in the present session of the Legislative Yuan, the quantity of examined patent applications will be more than that of new patent applications as of 2011 and, therefore, the time spent in examining a new patent application could be shortened from 36 months to 24 months as of 2013.  (2010.05)
/DC