Page 45 - 2018 Annual Report Taiwan Intellectual Property Office

III. IPR LEGAL REGIME
To improve the intellectual property rights protection environment, TIPO pushed for the revision of the Patent Act, the Patent Attorney Act, the Copyright Act, the Trade Secrets Act, and the CPTPP Supplementary Amendment Bill, and sought public feedback on the revision to the Trademark Act in 2018. In addition, to achieve the policy objective of improving examination quality, TIPO completed the revision to relevant regulations and patent and trademark examination guidelines, so that IPR legal regime can stay abreast of the times and meet the needs of the industry.
TIPO ANNUAL REPORT
01
Patent Laws and Regulations and Examination Guidelines
Patent Act and Regulations
• Draft Amendment to the Patent Act
After consulting relevant sectors for feedback, TIPO submitted the draft amendment to the Patent Act in 2018. It was approved by the Executive Yuan on December 27, 2018 and sent to the Legislative Yuan for further review on January 7, 2019. The key revisions include:
(1) The scope of applicability of division following approval decision was expanded from invention patent to utility model patent. The application period was extended from 30 days to 3 months following the approval.
(2) Supporting measures were added to improve efficiency in examining invalidation cases.
(3) Period of post-grant amendment to utility model patent and examination of the amendment was changed from formal examination to substantive examination.
(4) The term of design patent was extended from 12 to 15 years.
(5) Preservation and retention period and destruction of patent files were amended to solve the problem of insufficient file storage space.
Patent Laws and Regulations
.
43
III IPR LEGAL REGIME