Various regulations published earlier in 2013 became effective at the beginning of July. Here are some of the most notable ones:
1. An amendment was made concerning the regulations governing the determination of patent term extensions. The Taiwan Food and Drug Administration will supply data allowing TIPO to calculate the periods of domestic and foreign clinical trials for patent term extension during the regulatory registration of marketing approvals.
2. The service of electronic priority document exchange between the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) and the Korean Intellectual Property Office was extended to design patents. This service not only simplifies transnational filing procedures and saves the time and cost used for sending paper documents, but also accelerates patent examination procedures.
3. Concerning whether a prior art technique disclosed in the specification of an application can be used by the examiner as a citation, if the date of the prior art technique disclosed in the specification cannot be confirmed, the applicant has the possibility of proving the prior art technique belongs to the applicant and has not been disclosed to the public.
4. For divisional applications, if a divisional application is filed based on the invention patent application, the declaration in respect of the invention patent application can be invoked in the divisional application, and if the invention patent application and/or the divisional application are considered to be allowable and to be the same creation as the utility model patent, the examiner should notify the applicant to select either the invention patent application or the divisional application to benefit from the continuation of patent rights.