Patent Cooperation Treaty

The Treaty on the International cooperation in the field of patents, short Cooperation Treaty or PCT ( Patent Cooperation Treaty after the engl. ), Is an international treaty. By this Treaty, make its Contracting States enjoy a special dressing according to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property ( Paris Convention ).

The PCT allows association members, ie natural or legal persons who are either nationals of a Contracting State or domiciled in a Contracting State by filing a single patent application with the International Bureau of WIPO or other approved office (eg German Patent Office or European Patent Office) to apply for a patent for all Contracting States of the PCT.

Parties and non- Parties

As of October 4, 2013, 148 PCT Contracting States, ie based on the same date 193 member states of the United Nations, who are about 77 percent of all countries of the world. The most recently acceding States of the PCT are (in order of accession):

  • Thailand ( TH, Instrument of Accession September 24, 2009, entered into force December 24, 2009 )
  • Qatar (QA; ratification May 3, 2011, entry into force August 3, 2011 )
  • Rwanda ( RW; deposit of the instrument of accession, May 31, 2011, entry into force 31 August 2011),
  • Brunei Darussalam (BN; deposit of the instrument of accession, April 24, 2012, entered into force July 24, 2012 )
  • Panama ( PA; deposit of the instrument of accession, June 7, 2012, entered into force September 7, 2012 )
  • Saudi Arabia (SA, effective as of August 3, 2013 ) and
  • Iran (IR, effective October 4, 2013 ).

Nevertheless, some economically quite significant countries such as Argentina, Taiwan and Venezuela are currently no PCT Contracting States. In the following list, 48 states are listed which have not joined the PCT (as of October 4, 2013, each of the listed UN Member States, unless explicitly stated otherwise):

Method

The procedure under the PCT includes an international phase and a national (or regional ) phase.

In the international phase of an international search (Art. 12 ff PCT) is carried out according to the relevant prior art, and publishes the patent application with the search report. Subsequently, an application may be submitted to a preliminary examination, which will also be carried out even in the international phase and in accordance with the provisions of the PCT.

Within a specified period (usually 30 months after the filing of the international application or after the date of any priority claimed in application) must then make the transition into the national (or regional ) phase, that is, the applicant must the States for which he plans to pursue the patent national, or make a request for examination at a regional office, such as the European Patent Office EPO or the African offices ARIPO, OAPI and the Eurasian EAPO, pay the required fees and possibly a Submit translation of the patent into the official language. The further procedure for grant of a patent, that is, in particular, the final examination for patentability, then runs parallel to the national and regional offices.

Benefit

For the applicant this approach has the advantage that it only needs to submit an application for grant of a patent on the filing date, the application form must submit only one language (description, claims, drawings, abstract) and must pay the fees for the International patent application. He can then wait for the investigation and possibly the preliminary examination in order to assess the views of the patent application on success can. Thus he gains time to decide in which countries he wants to pursue the application. Only after 30 months (or 31 in individual patent offices, such as the European Patent Office ), the fees for all these countries, and may be submitted translations are then due.

When PCT procedure, however, is to remember that neither the international research nor the international preliminary examination shall be binding on the subsequent national (or regional ) phase. Specifically, this means that, for example, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office of a patent application, despite positive international report patentability often denies. The PCT procedure so no patents are granted, it is merely a central registration process.

Intellectual property
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