CNIPA joins the "PPH Improvement Initiative"

In order to further enhance the user experience of the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH), the Intellectual Property Office of China (CNIPA) announced on April 11, 2024, that it has joined the "PPH Improvement Initiative", which is a co-operation among the IP5 offices.

The five IP offices (IP5) is the name given to a forum of the five largest intellectual property offices in the world (China, the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Korea) that was set up to improve the efficiency of the examination process for patents worldwide.

The work of the IP5 has direct benefits for companies and inventors worldwide. Co-operation is helping the IP5 Offices to improve their services and to make access to the patent system straightforward and legally certain for innovators from all their regions.

With the PPH Improvement Initiative, IP5 has set a target of 3 months for the average cycle time of the first PPH notification of examination opinion and the average cycle time of PPH response to applicant's opinion in 2024, so as to provide a more predictable examination cycle for PPH users.

The Patent Prosecution Highway is an international cooperation program enabling applicants to request accelerated examination of a patent application pending at a second office (known as the office of later examination or OLE) and having been found allowable/patentable by a first office (known as the office of earlier examination or OEE).

Since the launch of the first PPH pilot program in November 2011, the CNIPA has established PPH cooperation with patent examination organizations in 32 countries or regions, recently extending the cooperation with Germany, Denmark and Chile (see here).

Read the announcement here (in Chinese).