-Formal review;
-Search;
-Substantive review.
In any of the above work, the normal examination procedure is to realize the communication mechanism between the patent office examiner and the applicant, mainly in written form. Patent agents play the role of middlemen to some extent. He needs to receive the communication documents of the Patent Office, suggest reasonable follow-up actions to the applicant, and reply to the communication documents of the Patent Office according to the requirements of the applicant. So what are the patent application reviews in Wenzhou?
1. Formal review
Before the formal review, the application documents need to be reviewed to ensure that all requirements for determining the application date are met. This examination is the most important examination, because if the application date is not determined, the patent application will be regarded as never submitted and there is no follow-up procedure. In the whole examination procedure, the date of application is very important, because it constitutes the start date of many specific actions, such as the term of patent right, and in appropriate cases, according to the provisions of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, the priority date of the latter application in other countries is determined. The filing date (priority date) is also closely related to the evaluation of novelty and creativity.
Priority can be based on national application, regional application or international application, as long as the filing time of these applications is within the previous 12 months. Its function is to replace the filing date of the national application with the filing date of the earlier application, which is particularly important for evaluating the related existing technologies required by novelty and creativity.
All member countries of Paris Convention and TRIPS Agreement can enjoy priority. However, it should be pointed out that for non-Paris Pact member countries, the laws of many countries provide that priority can be given according to mutually beneficial bilateral agreements.
Priority has many practical benefits for applicants who wish to seek protection in one or more countries. Since the applicant is not required to file all applications at home and abroad at the same time, the applicant has at most 12 months to decide which countries he wants to protect. Applicants can use this time to reasonably follow the established steps and obtain protection in many countries that are beneficial to them.
Once the application date of an application is determined, a formal review will generally be conducted immediately. The contents of the examination include the following points: the entrustment of the patent agent (if entrusted), the contents of the request, the inventor's statement, the requirements for the specification, claims and drawings, and the requirements for including the abstract in the application. During the formal examination, the applicant will be given the opportunity to correct the defects found in the application. If the defect is not modified within the prescribed time limit, the Patent Office will reject the patent application.
search
According to the review procedures stipulated by relevant laws, the retrieval is either separated from the substantive examination and conducted before the substantive examination, or simultaneously with the substantive examination. In either case, the purpose of the retrieval is to determine the prior art in the related field of the present invention. During the retrieval process, the Patent Office checks the collected documents to determine whether any documents describe the same or similar technical solutions as those in the application.
If retrieval and substantive examination are conducted separately, a retrieval report shall be sent to the applicant and listed:
-a list of retrieved documents that disclose the same or similar themes of inventions; and
-The claims in the application should be compared with each of the above documents.
The report can also indicate the scope of retrieval, that is, the types of documents that can be retrieved, the time span of retrieval, and the specific technical fields of retrieval.
The retrieval itself should be the retrieval of collected patent documents, mainly for the purpose of retrieval, arranged according to specific technical fields. Papers in technical journals and other so-called non-patent documents can be used as supplements to these patent documents. These collections of documents are usually called "retrieval documents".
The Patent Office can only retrieve the documents contained in the retrieved documents. Additional online computer searches can also be conducted in one or more commercial databases, and searches can also be conducted on the Internet. Retrieval should not be extended to public methods other than publications, in particular, it is impossible to determine whether it is carried out through public use by seeking publicity. This type of disclosure, even if it exists, will only be considered during the substantive examination, provided that such use has attracted the attention of the patent office due to the behavior of a third party.
Retrieval should first cover all directly related technical fields, and then it can be extended to similar fields, but this extension must be decided by the examiner according to the specific circumstances of each case, and the retrieval results of directly related technical fields should also be considered. It must be recognized that although the ideal goal of retrieval is to be as comprehensive as possible, it is not necessary to achieve this goal because of the inevitable shortcomings in classification system and information retrieval system, and it is also unreasonable in economy if the cost needs to be controlled within a reasonable range.
3. Substantive inspection
The purpose of the substantive examination procedure is to ensure that the patent application meets certain patentability conditions. In essence, this is to avoid the following situations when granting a patent right:
-Inventions excluded from patent protection by specific provisions of the law.
The invention is not new, not creative and/or not suitable for industrial application; or
-In the submitted documents, the invention is not fully disclosed in a clear and complete way.
As with the formal review, the applicant will have the opportunity to eliminate any defects in the actual trial stage. If the applicant fails to eliminate the defects within the prescribed time limit, the Patent Office will refuse to grant the patent right.
It is in the interests of the applicant and the public to allow the modification of the patent application. This can not only eliminate defects and obtain better patent authorization, but also make a better description of the invention and define the scope of patent protection more accurately through revision and clarification.
Not all modifications are allowed. As a general principle, if the content of the modification is beyond the scope of the original disclosure, such modification is not allowed.
It should be pointed out that since the purpose of any patent law is to protect inventions, the Patent Office can refuse to grant patent rights only if the examination results obviously hinder authorization. Generally speaking, doubts should be eliminated from the perspective of the interests of the applicant, because the final judgment of patent validity usually depends on the court.
The above is the Wenzhou patent application review of intellectual property introduction. Patent application examination should be understood by everyone now? If you have any other questions, please go to Intellectual Property official website to consult a professional intellectual property consultant.
Wenzhou patent application patent examination process patent application examination