Brazil: Say ‘bye-bye’ to the backlog?
The Brazilian patent and trademark office (INPI) has officially introduced its long-awaited plan to solve Brazil’s enduring patent backlog problem. The idea is to reduce the backlog by at least 80% in the course of the next two years.
After this period, the INPI estimates, it will be able to take less than 24 months to examine new patent applications. For that purpose, rules were issued to implement its Preliminary Standardized Office Action Program, a groundbreaking project to speed up the analysis of 160,000 unexamined applications filed before December 31, 2016.
In recent years, the INPI has committed itself to reducing the patent backlog through the implementation of many different strategies, including hiring new examiners; optimising internal procedures; implementing new technology and IT solutions; creating several fast-track programmes, that cover topics from green technologies to health-related applications and signing multiple Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) Agreements with patent offices around the world; and implementing the Pre-examination Office Action Program, taking advantage of the examination of foreign counterpart applications that were carried out by other patent offices abroad.
With all these recent efforts, the INPI has been able to significantly reduce the backlog, which went down from an average of 11.5 years to a little more than eight years.
However, the backlog is still a major problem that had to be addressed, motivating the government to develop a new solution, which is heavily based on the mechanism of the current Pre-examination Office Action Program.
The new scheme was announced with pomp and ceremony during an official ceremony by the Brazilian Economy Minister, Paulo Guedes, and by the president of the INPI, Claudio Vilar Furtado, as part of the efforts of the current administration to modernise the Brazilian business environment, which included the country’s accession to the Madrid Protocol in early July.
Programme details
The programme divides pending applications into three different groups:
Group I: applications for which a respective foreign counterpart was already examined;
Group II: applications that do not have a foreign counterpart examined abroad; and
Group III: applications that were subject to third party observations (pre-grant oppositions), to requests for inclusion into a fast-track programme (PPH or priority examination), that already received a technical opinion from the INPI or ANVISA (the Brazilian food and drug administration), or that were filed after December 31, 2016, which are not encompassed by this new programme.
