International Activities
The 14th Trilateral Users Meeting
On November 17, 2010, the 14th Trilateral Users Meeting was held in Virginia, the U.S, with representatives from AIPLA, IPO, BE(BusinessEurope), and JIPA. This meeting has been held twice a year since 2003, based on JIPA''s proposal to set up a forum to discuss common problems and promote harmonization.JIPA has encouraged the users associations and patent offices concerned to make further efforts to realize Patent Harmonization and improve examination quality through repeated opinion exchanges.
Following the progress made last time in terms of the use of the Common Application Format (which is the first step toward patent harmonization), the participants continued to focus on issues of Harmonization in Search and Examination this time, and in particular, they discussed the Common Citation Document. Mr. Shoubayashi, Chairperson of the 1st Patent Committee of JIPA, and Ms. Hayashida, Vice Chairperson of the same, made a presentation on the results of the study on the difference in the description requirements between Japan and the US, and proposed harmonization of the description requirements within the trilateral framework so as to mitigate users'' burden. This proposal was accepted as meaningful among the European and US user group, and they all decided to further the discussion on this issue. The participants also discussed other issues, including the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH), which will lead work-sharing among the Trilateral Offices, the response to meetings of the IP5, and Trilateral Users’ cooperation for improving patent quality. The Trilateral Users, through the exchange of opinions among them, decided on these agendas for the Trilateral Offices as their common requests.
On November 18, a Joint meeting of the heads of the Trilateral Offices and Users was held at the USPTO. At the meeting, with the aim of ensuring that high-quality patents will be obtained speedily and at low cost, constructive and positive opinions were exchanged with regard to workload reduction among the Trilateral Offices, and to efforts toward improving patent quality, as well as realizing a more user-friendly IP system.
The next meeting will be held in May 2011, in Munich, Germany.
