The Brazilian PTO implements PPH Program with the DKPTO

The BPTO published on August 21, 2018, the Rule #223/2018 implementing the PPH Pilot program with the DKPTO, that intends to speed up the examination of pending Brazilian applications with an application from the same nature allowed by the DKPTO.

The Program will accept applications belonging to patent families whose earliest application has been filed at the BPTO or the DKPTO or, in case of a PCT application, the BPTO or DKPTO was the receiving office.

The program will accept applications from the technical field of “Engineering, illumination, heating, guns and explosion”. The application must be classified under the IPC code F#, with the exception of drug-related applications (A61K) which are not allowed in this program.

To be accepted on the BPTO-DKPTO PPH Pilot Program, the application must:

i) Have been filed for more than 18 months or published by the WIPO (when applicable);
ii) Have the corresponding technical exam duly paid; (in case of divided patent applications, they must request priority procedure to all of them);

The participation of the application in the BPTO-DKIPO PPH Pilot Program shall be requested by any or all the applicants.

The BPTO-DKPTO PPH Pilot Program starts on September 01, 2018 and will receive applications up to August 31, 2020. Each applicant can only file one patent application per month, except during the last month of the project, when there will be no limit of the number of applications per applicant. The project is limited to 100 applications accepted into the BPTO-UKIPO PPH program per year (limit of 200 accepted applications during the entire program).

Amongst other documents requested by Rule #223/2018, the applicant must submit with the application, documents proving that the application meets the requirements and a table including the correspondences between the BR application claims and the DK allowed claims and a copy of non-patentary prior art documents.

The BPTO will evaluate the applications according to its request date, and applications that do not meet the requirements will either be given the opportunity to correct any irregularity, case in which the BPTO will issue an office action which must be replied to within 60 days, or be denied participation in the PPH Pilot Program, case in which it will return to the regular line of examination.

The original Portuguese version of Rule #223/2018 is available here.

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