China’s expedited review and expedited authorization

Recently, the EPO published an observation article on China’s accelerated review and rapid authorization.

The article stated that patent tracking is a necessary and common method used by the patent industry to monitor patent competitors. China currently has more than 1 million patent applications every year, and about 2 million utility models are authorized. Given this intensive IP activity, monitoring patent applications in a certain technological field has become increasingly time-consuming, as application and examination times are becoming shorter in China.

The public can use the window period between the Chinese patent disclosure text (A) and the patent grant announcement text (B) to submit third-party public opinions. In China, third-party public comments can also be submitted anonymously. After a patent is granted, the only way to challenge the patent in China is to file an invalidation application, but this process is often lengthy and expensive.

As can be seen from the example below, for a Chinese application, the interval from the filing of a new application on November 17, 2022 to the authorization on January 31, 2023 is less than 3 months.

Currently, many Chinese patents are first published far earlier than the required 18 months. But it is quite surprising that the patent was granted in such a short period of time.

Accelerated examination is nothing new in countries like Japan and South Korea, where patent grant announcement text is obtained much earlier than the first publication text. However, China’s patent law does not mention accelerated examination. The review guidelines on the CNIPA website also do not mention any way to speed up the review. Moreover, the substantive examination of a Chinese patent cannot begin before the first public publication (A) is published.

This also confirms previous descriptions that the first public publication was made public just four weeks after submission.

Experts experienced in searching Chinese patent documents are familiar with early Chinese publications, which were triggered by the government's intellectual property policies. However, this policy has recently changed. For Chinese patents, what matters now is no longer the number of applications, but the number of authorized patents. In other words, a patent application related to a competitor may be granted in China within weeks or even days, leaving little time for third parties to challenge the patent application by filing third-party opinions.

By looking at the Chinese patent electronic application website, especially the fee payment page, we can see the applicant’s intention (Figure 3).

The “Payment Date” column shows that all fees—not just the application fee, but also the substantive examination fee and the publication and printing fee—were paid together on the filing date (and received one day later).

This phenomenon that is happening in Chinese patents is increasingly becoming the rule. Tens of thousands of patent applications were filed in a wide range of technical fields, especially by a number of institutions and universities.

[Editor of Page Code: The accelerated authorization time brought about by China’s rapid protection is being noticed by more and more foreign colleagues. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, we need to wait and see]