News

New Brazilian pilot program on the issuance of pre-examination reports

The Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BRPTO) published on January 16, 2018 a notice from the Patent Board informing about a new pilot program related to the issuance of pre-examination reports, in an effort to expedite the substantive analysis of patent applications. Such pre-examination reports will recite prior art documents mentioned during the examination of corresponding applications in other Patent offices, which will be considered during the substantive technical examination.

The Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BRPTO) published on January 16, 2018 a notice from the Patent Board informing about a new pilot program related to the issuance of pre-examination reports, in an effort to expedite the substantive analysis of patent applications. Such pre-examination reports will recite prior art documents mentioned during the examination of corresponding applications in other Patent offices, which will be considered during the substantive technical examination.

Thus, after the issuance of the pre-examination report, the applicants may submit amendments to correct irregularities already pointed out by any examination report of other PTO’s as well as to adapt the application to the Brazilian current practice. The applicants will have 60 days to respond to the pre-examination report, under pain of shelving of the application.

It is important to notice that this pilot program is NOT a Patent Revalidation, since it has the only intention of expediting the substantive analysis that will be carried out by the Brazilian Examiners.

According to this notice, from January 23 and up to March 13, 2018, pre-examination reports will be issued in the total of forty (40) patent applications per technical division. Currently, the BRPTO has twenty (20) technical divisions, thus we expect that at least 800 cases will have the prior art search expedited by this program.

Finally, the cases will be chosen by the BRPTO following the normal queue of examination and the examiners can make additional searches at the substantive examination stage as they deem necessary.