On February 22, 2023, the National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) conducted its regularly scheduled press conference, highlighting the approaches the agency works to support the market and innovation-related subjects.
In the press conference, CNIPA emphasized that it will keep enhancing the effectiveness and quality of intellectual property examination. The examination process for patents for new inventions will be shortened to no more than 16 months during this year, and the validity rate of the examination conclusion will increase to above 93%. It will be continually encouraged to examine utility models for evident originality, designs for obvious uniqueness, and worldwide applicability.
The requirements for patent examination in emerging fields including big data, artificial intelligence, gene technology, and other important core technologies will be improved in line with China’s potential for scientific and technological innovation and industrial growth. To further enhance the quality of the examination, evident differentiation examination, and obvious inventiveness examination will be added to utility model and design examinations, respectively. The Hague Convention on the International Registration of Industrial Designs requirements and the analysis of international design submissions will continue to be priorities for CNIPA.
In recent years, CNIPA has managed to keep up its development of examination quality and effectiveness while also strengthening control over patent granting, shortening the examination cycle, and setting higher standards for examination policy standards. For businesses, a reasonable reduction in the length of the patent examination process can, on the one hand, allow innovative technologies to be legally protected more quickly and provide a foundation and rationalization for their economic value; on the other hand, it will encourage the rapid transformation of invention technologies, which is conducive to the rapid formation of the core competitiveness of businesses, and it will also allow innovative technologies to enter the market.
In addition, a stricter patent granting process and continuous improvement of examination policy standards go hand in hand with the compression of the patent examination cycle, establishing new standards for businesses in terms of both the development of innovative technology and the submission of patent applications and office action processing.
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