Newsletter
IPO PRACTICE FOR PRIORITY HANDLING OF CANCELLATION ACTIONS
According to Article 90 Paragraph 3 of the Pat-ent Act, where a patent cancellation action re-lates to a patent infringement litigation case, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) may give pri-ority to examining such cancellation action. On 30 November 2006, the IPO announced the fol-lowing:
To protect both parties' interests and to im-prove the timeliness of courts' hearing of in-fringement litigation cases, the IPO will pri-oritize the examination of cancellation actions that relate to infringement litigation cases. No additional fees will be charged for priority examination of such cancellation actions.
When an application is filed for priority ex-amination of a cancellation action, a "Regis-tration Form for Litigation-Related Cancella-tion Action" should be filled out, which will be used to monitor the progress of examina-tion of the concerned cancellation action.
Since litigation-related cancellation actions involves procedural steps, such as submission of missing items, defense, defenses, on-site inspections, interviews, etc., computer ad-ministration and monitoring mechanisms will be used for such cases.