Africa: patenting against the clock
A patent prosecution process carried by a patent office takes a significant time lasting usually from three to six years. The period from filing the patent application to patent granting depends on several factors, for example the work capacity of the patent office, meeting of the patentability criteria, number of necessary substantive examinations, and some time limits set forth by patent laws and regulations.
In certain situations, the necessary regular period to get a patent granted in some specific jurisdiction does not meet the expectations of the applicant, namely when the applicant wishes to have his patent granted as soon as possible in order to quickly enforce it.
This situation can happen when there is an infringement of the patent that harms its scope of protection in a certain jurisdiction or when the technology has a short lifespan and the effects of its related patent must be used timely.
Considering this background, several patent offices offer to the applicant legal provisions that are configurated to provide a faster prosecution of a patent application. There are several embodiments of accelerated examination procedures, wherein the simplest ones comprise a mere request by an applicant for an accelerated examination for a specific patent application, as the PACE programme, established by the European Patent Office (EPO).
Other embodiments comprise more complex rules and are dependent of bilateral agreements and cooperative examinations between patent offices, for example the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH).
This study aims to display relevant details regarding the legal framework for accelerated substantive examination of patents in a subset of African countries, presenting examples of jurisdictions where is possible to file an application to install an accelerated substantive examination for a patent application.
The jurisdictions explicitly cited in table 1 have received about 92% of the patent applications filed in Africa from 2009 to 2019, according to data retrieved from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) statistics database, but only Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) provide explicit details about embodiments of accelerated examination.
Table 1:
