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PPH impact on substantive examination in Mexico

The patent prosecution highway (PPH) program allows for an applicant to speed up the examination procedures of his/her application by enabling the use of a substantive examination carried out by another participating PPH Intellectual Property Office, thus reducing unnecessary duplication of efforts, making more efficient and faster to obtain corresponding patents.

Consequently promoting the requisition of a PPH for an application that has received a favorable ruling, that at least one claim in said application is patentable, it enables the applicant to fast-track the substantive examination not having to abide to the normal periods that the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (MIIP) gives for initiating the substantive examination.

Hence, the PPH offers to an applicant very appealing time reductions and money savings.

Since the MIIP instituted the implementation of the observation period, applications must wait a mandatory six months period subsequent to the publication, wherein it is not possible to file any changes or amendments, thus in addition that a substantive examination of an application may take up to 2 years, the prosecution may result in a quite long period of time, therefore, based on the previous arguments the PPH can provide a huge advantage over the normal prosecution being that once the PPH has been requested, the corresponding patent may be granted on an average of 15 working days.

Additionally, when a PPH request is filed, which relates to the official fees corresponding to a voluntary amendment rate, and which would correspond to about 50 % savings over a substantive examination fees.

Furthermore, although up to date the patents obtained by PPH are few compare to the thousands of applications filed in our country, the PPH offers to an applicant or inventor very appealing opportunities of extrapolating in a fast-track and economic manner the favorable outcomes already obtained in other Intellectual Property Offices, to obtain a good leverage for the granting resolution in Mexico.

Similarly, if an applicant gets a positive resolution for a patent application in Mexico and has the corresponding applications in countries which have signed to the PPH, he/she may also request the granting of said applications on the grounds of the substantive examination performed by the MIIP, reducing thus the time and costs in other countries.

Lastly, Clarke, Modet and C° (Mexico) has a 100 % success on the submission and granting of PPH applications, thus ensuring that any request will be specially treated to meet the requirements and provisions of PPH.