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Patent offices make dual filing top priority

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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Japan Patent Office (JPO) announced at the end of July that they have launched a new system for the electronic exchange of priority documents. Both offices are determined to make priority documents easier to exchange in order to speed up bilateral filing processes.

According to the Paris Convention, an applicant filing for a patent in one Convention state can transfer its original filing date to the patent offices of other member nations, if those filings are made within the following 12 months. That makes the first filing a ‘priority document’ that fixes its date across all relevant countries.

Paris Convention filings enable firms to focus on which nations to build into their business strategies as they plan their global moves. The new system between the USPTO and JPO will enable each office to search for and retrieve priority documents from the other’s database without passing the cost on to the applicant.

This is likely to make Paris Convention filings between the US and Japan more manageable, and more attractive for applicants to participate in. The offices hope that this will have a positive effect on US-Japanese business relations.

USPTO director, Jon Dudas, said: ‘Streamlining the patent application process benefits all users of the system and reduces costs. This partnership with our JPO colleagues demonstrates how cooperation by and among offices can result in material improvements for innovators.’