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PATENT PROCEDURAL EXAMI-NATION GUIDELINES IN PREPARATION
Following the entry into force of the amended Patent Act on 1 July 2004, the Intellectual Property Office recently published draft amendments to its Procedural Examination Guidelines for Patent Applications, and began holding public hearings from 14 January 2005 onward, to solicit opinion from a broad range of stakeholders.
Procedural examination of a patent application is conducted to determine whether the application documents comply with the provisions of the Patent Act and its Enforcement Rules. In par-ticular, for a new application, the documents are examined to check whether the application form, specification, and necessary drawings are all present, because the determination of the filing date depends on these. The Patent Act applies the First-to-File principle, and priority claims must be declared on the date of filing a patent application. Hence the determination of a filing date is a key issue for the granting of a patent, and the filing date also determines the time point for judging patentability during examination of the application.
In principle, the content and scope of procedural examination include the following: the format of the various documents and forms, the mode of writing the application, the methods of filling in forms and of producing drawings, whether statutorily required evidentiary documents are present and legally valid, determination of the filing date, eligibility of the inventor or creator and of the applicant, whether the application procedure complies with the legislative provi-sions, eligibility and authority of an agent, and whether the statutory fees have been paid.
Lee and Li has participated in the various dis-cussions held during the preparation of the Guidelines, and have made various suggestions to the IPO for simplification of the over all pa-perwork. Once the IPO has finalized the Guide-lines, we will report the main points to our readers.