Hitch a ride on the patent highway

01 April 2008

The EPO is the latest patent office to sign up to a patent prosecution highway. But do these schemes offer more advantages to applicants or examiners? Emma Barraclough reports

On the outskirts of the UK's second city, Birmingham, is one of the country's more notorious pieces of transport architecture: a complex highway interchange built 36 years ago and immediately nicknamed spaghetti junction.

Over in the patent world, IP office bureaucrats are designing a similarly complex series of highway interchanges between examiners as far apart as Tokyo, Munich, Seoul, South Wales and Alexandria, Virginia. Over the past two years, a flurry of road building has led to nine so-called patent prosecution highways (PPH) being piloted or finalized, and more in the early planning stages (see chart). Last month saw the establishment of the latest – a highway between the JPO and the German Patent and Trade Mark Office, as well as an announcement of a planned route between the EPO and the USPTO.

These bilateral PPH programmes are designed to allow applicants who have received a patent examination report from...

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