Accelerated Patent Examination in Türkiye - PPH

Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) accelerates the examination process for corresponding applications submitted to participating IP offices on the basis of bilateral IP office agreements. The purpose is to: support applicants in their efforts to secure stable patent rights, as well as to reduce the burden of search/examination and improve the quality of examination. Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) is a framework in which applicants can request accelerated examination at the Office of Second Filing (OSF) through a simplified procedure for applications whose claims are determined to be patentable at the Office of First Filing (OFF). Under the PPH system, patent offices have developed PPH, PPH Mottaini, PPH-PCT and Global PPH agreements on the basis of bilateral and multilateral agreements.

PPH requests must meet the following conditions:

• Türkiye has currently signed bilateral PPH agreements with the Spanish Patent Office SIPO and the Japanese Patent Office JPO. Patent applicants should submit PPH requests to TURKPATENT in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Patent Prosecution Highway and attach relevant supporting documents.
  • (a) The Turkish patent application for which the PPH request is filed and the SPTO/JPO patent application forming the basis for the PPH request should have the same priority date or filing date.
  • (b) At least one or more claims are determined by the SPTO/JPO to be patentable/patentable.
  • (c) The claims examined in TURKPATENT under the PPH, whether as originally filed or as amended, must sufficiently correspond to one or more claims designated as patentable/allowable by the SPTO. Claims are considered to “sufficiently correspond” if they have the same or similar scope, or if the claims of the Turkish invention patent application are narrower in scope.
  • (d) The substantive examination of the invention patent application in Türkiye has not yet begun.
• Required documents:
  • The Turkish or English translation of the patentability or intention to grant examination opinion issued by SPTO or JPO. Applicants can request TURKPATENT to obtain it from the SPTO/JPO database (machine translation is sufficient, but if the examiner requires, a more accurate translation must be resubmitted)
  • Claims that sufficiently correspond to those in the SPTO or JPO.
  • A complete claim correspondence table showing the correspondence between the claims of the TURKPATENT application and the corresponding SPTO/JPO claims.
  • Copies of references cited by the SPTO or JPO examiner. If the reference is a patent document, these documents do not need to be submitted. If TURKPATENT does not have access to the relevant patent document, the applicant must submit these documents upon request from TURKPATENT. Non-patent documents must always be submitted. No translation is required.
    

In addition, there are several other forms of PPH:

1.PPH MOTTAINAI:

Under the current PPH system, the examination results must be provided to the prior examination office OFF before the subsequent examination office can accept the examination results. Obviously, this requirement limits some demand, because OFF may not always conduct examinations before OSF and have examination results. In this case, PPH MOTTAINAI appeared. In Japanese, MOTTAINAI means "waste". The PPH MOTTAINAI project was launched with the unanimous agreement of the eight patent offices. Under the PPH MOTTAINAI pilot, applicants can use the examination results of the prior examination office (OEE) to submit a PPH request to the subsequent examination office (OLE), provided that the OEE and OLE have a PPH MOTTAINAI agreement.

2. PCT - PPH:

If a PCT international application is patentable in the international phase, the national phase application (second application) corresponding to the international application can be accelerated in the national phase based on the applicant's PPH request.