China allows the filing of divisional applications but under specific circumstances. Most importantly, divisional applications can usually only be filed voluntarily during the prosecution of the original parent application. Once the parent application is granted or withdrawn, no additional voluntary divisional applications may be filed. However, divisionals can be filed to pursue subject matter not yet pursued due to a unity rejection raised by an examiner in an earlier application at any time regardless of the status of the parent application. Timelines: When Must a Divisional Application Be Filed? A divisional application can be filed : at any time during the pendency of the parent application, which means before the…
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Major and Exciting Changes to China’s Patent Law [Fourth Amendment to China’s Patent Law]
Major changes are on the horizon for China’s Patent Law, which will see an overhaul in many areas as early as this year (2019). On January 4, 2019, the National People’s Congress in China published the latest draft of the Fourth Amendment to China’s Patent Law. Several draft amendments have been released for public comment in the past several years, starting from 2012 to this most recent one in 2019. The period for public comment just closed on February 3, 2019. The goal is to implement this amendment in 2019. As a whole, these proposed changes address a lot of the criticisms people have had regarding the strength of IP…
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Finally a unified “Court of Appeal” for technology IP in China
On October 26, 2018, China’s Supreme People’s Court (“SPC”) received approval to establish a specialized intellectual property court within the SPC to handle appeal cases involving technology-related IP for both civil (e.g., patent infringement) and administrative (e.g., patent invalidity) judgments. Technology-related IP includes invention patents, utility models, new plant species, IC design, trade secret, software, and anti-trust cases. [1] On December 28, 2018, the SPC announced the opening of this new SPC IP Court on January 1, 2019, and laid out some details surrounding how things would work [2]. We have summarized some of the details below. The SPC IP Court is based in Beijing and its judgments, rulings, mediations,…
