What is PCT?

PCT is the abbreviation of patent cooperation treaty, which is an international treaty concluded by various countries to save the repeated work of applicants and patent offices. The application based on this treaty is a PCT application, also known as an international application.

Before the treaty is made, if the applicant wants to obtain patent protection in multiple countries, he must submit patent applications to each country one by one, and the patent office of each country needs to search and review the corresponding national applications. PCT applications only need to be submitted in one language at the PCT Acceptance Bureau, which is valid in all (designated) PCT member countries. The acceptance bureau only needs to conduct an international search and formal review of the application.

Therefore, PCT applications are generally filed when patent protection is obtained from multiple countries for the same technology, and when requesting patent protection from a single country, only one patent application needs to be submitted to that country.

According to what you said, the patent has been applied for and authorized in China. According to the internationally accepted explanation of patent novelty, patents authorized in any country (except confidential patents) belong to public technology. At this time, the application to any country has lost its novelty and cannot be authorized.

So your current situation can only be dealt with first. According to the provisions of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (Paris Convention), patent applications filed in one member country enjoy priority in another member country, in which the priority period for inventions and utility models is 12 months, and the priority period for designs is 6 months. If you file a patent application in China within the above period, you need to submit your application to the United States as soon as possible and claim priority. If you exceed the above time limit, it is a pity that your technology has lost its novelty and you can no longer obtain patent authorization and protection in the United States.

(For nru***, the United States is a signatory to PCT, and it is also the acceptance bureau, international search bureau and international preliminary examination bureau designated by the International Bureau. )