Under the PPH an applicant receiving a report from either the USPTO or IP Australia with at least one patentable claim in an examination may ask the other office to speed up the examination of the corresponding application.
“We strongly support the aim of this initiative with its benefits of increasing quality and efficiency of examination while reducing pendency time,” said IP Australia’s director-general Philip Noonan.
The trial will run for one year, with a one-year extension if needed.
This year the USPTO has increased its efforts to share work with a number of different IP offices. On January 4 the PPH between the USPTO and Japan became permanent. In the same month the USPTO announced pilot PPH programmes with South Korea and Canada. Earlier this month the EPO and USPTO announced a project similar to a PPH, which will launch in September this year.
More information on how to file a request for accelerated examination at IP Australia is available here. The request form is available here.
The April issue of Managing IP includes an article that considers the benefits of the PPH system to both applicants and IP offices. You can read it here when the issue becomes live later this week.
