The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) has issued an update to the Examination Guidelines for Patent Applications on March 2020 to provide further guidance on validity of priority claims and lack of unity objections.
Validity of priority
In assessing whether an invention in an application may be accorded its claimed priority date from an earlier application, IPOS has clarified that the focus of the assessment is on whether the earlier application, directly and unambiguously as a whole, while taking into account the common general knowledge of the skilled person, discloses the invention in the concerned application whose priority is in question. The disclosure may be explicit or implicit, and must enable the skilled person to work the invention in the concerned application.
The earlier application need not necessarily describe every possible embodiment of the invention for it to disclose and enable the subject matter of the concerned application. For instance, where the claimed invention relates to a principle of general application, it may be sufficient that the earlier application describes a limited number of individual embodiments of the general application. The number of, and extent to which, the individual embodiments need to be disclosed will vary from case to case. Continue Reading