Taiwan IPO Announcement of Patent Accelerated Program (AEP) Application Statistics (to the end of March 2017) and the efficiency of the initial Office Action
For the purpose of shortening the pending time of Patent examination, TIPO (Taiwan Intellectual Property Office) announced that patent applications meet one of the following 4 conditions, the patent applicant can apply for AEP (Patent Accelerated Program).
In other words，Condition 1:The corresponding application has been approved by a foreign patent authority under substantive examination；Condition 2 : The EPO, JPO or USPTO has issued an OA during substantive examination but has yet to approve the application’s foreign counterpart；Condition 3: The invention application is essential to commercial exploitation；and Condition 4: Inventions related to green technologies. With respect to the above 4 conditions, Taiwan Intellectual Property Office will issue the initial Office Action within 6~9 months after formal application.
The following is the AEP application statistics from 2011 to the first quarter of 2017.
The overall amount of AEP applications decline year by year. Presumably, the reason is that in recent years, the overall application of Taiwan’s patent applications is on the weak, furthermore, coupled with the TIPO’s speeding up case-clearing policy.
However, we are more interested in the average Lead time of receiving the initial OA to the AEP cases.
The lead time of the initial OA via AEP is about 2 ~ 4 months. In comparing with the general cases, taking 10~15 months, AEP is far more efficiently.
At present, Taiwan’s local AEP application, mostly use Condition 3 (about 61% of Taiwan’s AEP application). As for Foreigner’s AEP applications, mostly use Condition 1 (about 85% of foreign AEP applications).