International Activities
The 13th Trilateral User Meeting
On June 2, 2010, the 13th Trilateral Users Meeting was held with representatives from American Intellectual Property Law Association AIPLA), Intellectual Property Owners (IPO), BusinessEurope, and JIPA. This meeting has held twice a year since 2003, when JIPA had proposed to set up a forum for discussion to resolve common problems.
JIPA has worked on concerned patent offices to further effort to realize Paten Harmonization and improve examination quality through repeated opinion exchanges.
As The Meeting made considerable progress in terms of Common Application Format Issue last time, so they focused on issues of Harmonization in Search and Examination this time. Specifically, they discussed “Common Citation Document” and “common Search Strategy”.
Also they discussed PPH which will lead work-sharing among Trilateral Offices, future trend of PCT Reform, The Five Intellectual Property Offices readiness, and Trilateral Users’ Cooperation for improving patent quality. The trilateral Users decided to ask these agendas for the Trilateral Offices as Users’ common requests.
From this year, the working-level meeting between the Trilateral Offices and Users was also held in spring as well as in the fall. The next day Trilateral Offices and Users Working Level Meeting was held at USPTO. At the meeting, a positive opinion about workload reduction among the Trilateral Offices and efforts toward realizing user-friendly IP system were exchanged.
The next meeting will be held in November, in the United States.
