IP AUSTRALIA Quality assurance
IP Australia must examine patent applications quickly and grant quality rights if Australia is going to succeed in becoming more innovative. Noonan has set high standards for his office. “We can never do too well on quality,” he says, and he has emphasised the importance of patent quality with internal initiatives that are designed to improve it. IP Australia began using the European Patent Office’s search system in 2008 to give its examiners access to more patent information. It has also implemented a quality system that involves statistically significant samples of matters from every examiner being subject to independent review against comprehensive quality standards.
“We’ve had two years of trials and then full implementation,” says Noonan. “During that time we’ve lifted our results quite considerably. We are now avoiding tier one errors, which tend to affect the validity of a patent, 98 percent of the time.
“The two years of implementation has been a pretty tough process, introducing a level of review that our examiners have not previously
“THE NEW BILL HAS TAKEN AWAY THOSE EXTRA GLOSSES WHICH CAN, ARGUABLY, LEAD APPLICANTS TO THINK THERE’S AN EXTRA TEST IN THE APPLICATION PROCESS, OR EVEN LESS PRIOR ART THAT’S APPLICABLE.”
training programmes and improvements to our manuals and systems.”
The Raising the Bar bill comes into play here too, as it contains provisions that will affect the quality of Australian patents. The bill will force patent applicants to address all of the grounds for patentability during the application process, which is not currently the case. Noonan says: “My view is that if you want a 20-year monopoly you should be required to make your case on all grounds, at least on the balance of probabilities, and that’s what the bill will introduce.
“Not all grounds are available on examination. For example, currently the question of utility cannot be raised on examination—it can only become relevant during oppositions or court proceedings. We would say that’s a crazy way of going about things.”
been exposed to. I give them great credit for embracing the concept and for working with us as we bed the system down. What we need to do now is to feed back the learnings that we’re getting out of the system in the shape of better
Pendency times can come down from 12 months for the first report, according to Noonan. “We want to balance that against bedding in our quality systems, so it will go down further as we can achieve good results on quality at the same time,” he says. “I’d like to reduce it by a few more months.”
30 World Intellectual Property Review March/April 2012
www.worldipreview.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76