As an effort to expedite examination of pending patent applications, part of the Executive Yuan approved “Patent Backlog Reduction Project” is to increase manpower for examination work. The legal basis for this increase in staff was drafted in the amendment to TIPO’s Organization Act, which passed third reading at the legislative Yuan on December 12, 2011, and entered into effect on December 30. TIPO will hire new staff in 2012 according to regulations of the amended Organization Act:

a. Hiring 170 patent examiners on five-year contract
b. Filling the 39 clerk vacancies with assistant patent examiners
c. Employing 70 alternative military draftees with R&D background to assist with prior art search
d. Establishing Patent Search Center to conduct search report

In 2011, TIPO increased the overall number of concluded applications; with the assistance of 97 alternative military draftees who are knowledgeable in R&D to conduct patent search, a total of 36,627 applications were concluded. This is a significant increase from the 28,526 applications concluded in 2010 and 23,382 applications in 2009. On the average, each examiner concluded 110 applications in 2011, an increase from 99 and 105 applications respectively for 2009 and 2010. Although the number of concluded applications has increased in 2011, due to shortage of examiners, this number is still by far much less than the number of applications for substantive examination, which totaled to 43,500 cases. This gap between concluded cases and incoming cases has upped the number of pending invention patents to 160,318 cases, with an average of 45.12 months to conclude a case.

Once the aforementioned staff report to duty in 2012, the number of concluded applications is expected to reach 45,000 cases; this would be the first time the number of concluded applications exceeds the number of applications for substantive examination. TIPO expects the number of pending applications to diminish by year, and be reduced to 78,000 cases by the end of 2016, with an average examination time of less than 24 months.

Source : Intellectual Property Office