It was announced today that the review has been completed, and that IP Australia will now be requesting approval from the government to make regulations increasing a number of fees from 1 August 2010.
The proposed new fees were previously published for public comment in this Fee Review Summary document.
Most of the proposed fee increases are incremental. One significant exception is the introduction of a new fee (item 222A), applicable to amendments made after acceptance of an application that have the effect of increasing the number of claims. When the resulting total is in excess of 20, each new claim above this number will incur a fee of A$100.00, corresponding with the excess claims fees currently payable at acceptance of an application.
In fairness, the existing system based on the number of claims in an application at acceptance has been subject to a form of legal "fee avoidance". It has been perfectly legitimate, for example, to cancel dependent claims prior to acceptance in order to avoid excess claim fees, and then reintroduce them after acceptance for a fixed amendment request fee of A$250.00. The proposed new fee therefore simply ensures that adding claims after acceptance incurs the fees that would have been payable had all claims been present at acceptance.
The fee associated with a request for an extension of term of a pharmaceutical patent, to compensate for regulatory delays, will also be increased significantly under the proposal, from A$1300.00 to A$2000.00. We are confident, however, that the pharmaceutical companies will be able to afford the increase!
A further hike in PCT-related search fees (including International-Type Search), from A$1600.00 to A$1900.00, is also proposed.
Whether the fee changes are approved to go ahead exactly as proposed remains to be seen, but seems likely. We will keep you posted.
Before You Go…
Thank you for reading this article to the end – I hope you enjoyed it, and found it useful. Almost every article I post here takes a few hours of my time to research and write, and I have never felt the need to ask for anything in return.
But now – for the first, and perhaps only, time – I am asking for a favour. If you are a patent attorney, examiner, or other professional who is experienced in reading and interpreting patent claims, I could really use your help with my PhD research. My project involves applying artificial intelligence to analyse patent claim scope systematically, with the goal of better understanding how different legal and regulatory choices influence the boundaries of patent protection. But I need data to train my models, and that is where you can potentially assist me. If every qualified person who reads this request could spare just a couple of hours over the next few weeks, I could gather all the data I need.
The task itself is straightforward and web-based – I am asking participants to compare pairs of patent claims and evaluate their relative scope, using an online application that I have designed and implemented over the past few months. No special knowledge is required beyond the ability to read and understand patent claims in technical fields with which you are familiar. You might even find it to be fun!
There is more information on the project website, at claimscopeproject.net. In particular, you can read:
- a detailed description of the study, its goals and benefits; and
- instructions for the use of the online claim comparison application.
Thank you for considering this request!
Mark Summerfield
0 comments:
Post a Comment