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USPTO and JPO implement full-time patent prosecution highway

The USPTO and the JPO for almost 18 months have worked together on a patent prosecution highway (PPH), which has proven very effective for both countries and has now gone into full-time operation.

Jon Dudas, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO was happy with the results from the patent highway, "The pilot project shows that the Patent Prosecution Highway offers significant potential for our offices to make inroads in reducing our backlogs, eliminating redundant work, and examining more efficiently … By leveraging work done by other offices, the USPTO can make better use of its resources to speed up processing and improve quality. Implementation of the Patent Prosecution Highway is an important first step in building up the office-to-office network of cooperation that will be necessary to make the full vision of work sharing on a global scale a reality."

"The results of the pilot project between Japan and the United States show that the PPH is an effective scheme for streamlining patent prosecution and supports Japanese and U.S. industries to acquire patents expeditiously and obtain high quality patents," said Masahiro Koezuka, Commissioner of the JPO. "This implementation on a full-time basis between the two countries is expected to further contribute to the realisation of a global patent prosecution highway network."

The reason why the PPH is effective is that any applicant who has a ruling from either the JPO or the USPTO, where one claim or more in an application is patentable, can have the other office fast track the same application. Applicants can then expect to obtain their patents from both offices faster than before.

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