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4 July 2016Patents

EPO and IP Australia agree PPH deal

The European Patent Office (EPO) and Australia’s intellectual property office have launched a Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) aimed at accelerating examinations of patent applications at both offices.

The agreement was confirmed on Friday, July 1, and follows a memorandum of understanding signed last year by EPO president Benoît Battistelli and Patricia Kelly, director general of IP Australia.

Under the pilot programme, which will initially run for three years, applicants whose claims have been found to be patentable by either office may ask for accelerated processing of the corresponding application at the other office.

Both offices will also co-operate on sharing data and improving access to information for IP offices and users of the patent system.

In a statement, Battistelli said: “Australia is an important market for European companies and a growing source of applications at the EPO, so we’re very pleased to be able to launch this pilot programme.”

The EPO already has PPH programmes in place with the remaining ‘IP5’ offices—the world’s five largest IP offices—and the national patent offices of Canada, Israel, Mexico and Singapore.

Alongside the EPO, the IP5 members are the State Intellectual Property Office in China, the Japan Patent Office, the Korea Intellectual Property Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office.

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