Bilateral PPH programmes are designed to allow applicants who have received an examination report from one office to request accelerated examination of a corresponding patent application filed in the other country.

Manuel Desantes, vice-president of international affairs at the EPO, told Managing IP that it had taken longer for the EPO to get involved in such international schemes because of differences in application procedures between the EPO on one hand and the USPTO and the JPO - its counterparts in the Trilateral Offices - on the other.

"The PPH between the US and Japan envisaged that, for example, when the US examiner decides to grant a patent, the Japanese examiner would receive the application ready for granting. We don't have such a system."

Instead, the EPO provides applicants with a search and written opinion in around six months. In the US, it can take 26 months for a first office action and at the JPO even longer.

"Therefore we understood that for our files to be eligible for a PPH and for the system to be efficient, it would be enough for us to provide the search and written opinion rather than the dossier ready for granting," Desantes added.

The pilot project is slated to start in September but officials are still working out the details of the scheme, including the point at which patent applications first filed at the USPTO should be handed over to EPO examiners. One possibility is that it will be at the time that the USPTO issues the first office action.

The JPO is now considering whether to take part in a similar scheme with the EPO. "The Japanese didn't say no, they just want more time to consider how it could work," said Desantes.

The PPH between the US and Europe is one of a series of measures adopted by leaders of the world's three biggest IP offices last week to reduce duplication of work and cut patent application backlogs and pendency.

Representatives from the EPO , JPO and USPTO were in Munich for a meeting of the Trilateral Strategic Working Group. The three offices set up the Trilateral Office 25 years ago to debate common concerns.

In a statement issued by the EPO, which hosted the meeting, officials said that the three Offices had agreed a series of goals for 2008 in the area of work sharing.

Trilateral leaders

These include making mutual exploitation of work results the top priority for Trilateral cooperation; concentrating cooperation activities in selected technical areas to allow the benefits of cooperation to be evaluated more clearly; and preparing for the Common Application Format, which will allow applicants to prepare a single application valid in Europe, the US and Japan from the start of 2009.

The statement went on to say that representatives of the three offices had stressed that quality would play a "vital role" in the success of the work-sharing projects and agreed that the EPO would lead a study to identify best practices and develop a roadmap for managing quality.

The patent prosecution highway between the EPO and the USPTO is the latest in a series of PPH projects between some of the world's busiest offices.

On January 4 a PPH between the JPO and USPTO became permanent. The JPO also has pilot PPHs with KIPO and UKIPO and is due to launch one with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office this month. Earlier this year, the USPTO said that it would extend its PPH network to the Canadian and Korean patent offices.

But, until now, the European Patent Office has appeared less enthusiastic about PPH projects than many of its counterparts.

That is largely the result of concerns on the part of a number of EPO member states that higher levels of work sharing could compromise the EPO's reputation for patent quality.

In an interview published in Managing IP 's February issue , Roland Grossenbacher, chair of the EPO's Administrative Council, said that harmonizing procedures in the Trilateral Offices was "controversial" and not something that should be under-estimated.

"It looks sensible to me to make better use of the work done in the Trilateral," he said. "But we should question whether this is the only aspect to be taken into consideration. Sometimes duplication can ensure better quality: four eyes are better than two."

He added: "The big problem from a European viewpoint is that the Japanese and US backlogs are such that hardly any results from the USPTO or JPO are timely available for the EPO. We are not on an equal footing there. They are unable to contribute because their backlogs are so much bigger. It's very difficult when you have different situations among the three partners."

But Alison Brimelow, who took over the presidency of the EPO in July last year, has made it clear that she thinks that the European Office should play a bigger role in the Trilateral discussions in an effort to deal with a high volume of patent applications and long pendency.

In an interview with Managing IP published last year she said: "We've been rather careful about the patent prosecution highway coming out of the Trilateral. Not least because we produce our searches faster than the others so I think the Office thought this was a one-way street going the wrong way. But this is one of the occasions where I think saying 'no' was not terribly helpful and we have to try and reengage with the Trilateral now."

Desantes said the EPO was not involved in negotiations with other IP offices to set up PPHs - for the time being. "We are very interested in knowing the results of the pilot schemes underway at the moment. We'll look to see the results and then decide whether we can be open to other possibilities."