On March 3, 2017, a Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) pilot program started between the National Institute of Industrial Property of Argentina (INPI) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
The pilot program will run for a period of three years ending on March 2, 2020, which may be extended if necessary to adequately assess the feasibility of the PPH program. Both offices will continually evaluate the results of the PPH program to determine whether and how the program should be modified. The offices also may terminate the PPH program early if the volume of participation exceeds a manageable level, or for any other reason.
Under this PPH pilot program, an applicant who receives a positive ruling on a patent claim(s) from either the INPI or the USPTO may request accelerated prosecution of a corresponding claim(s) in the other office. The PPH allows the applicant to obtain a patentability decision in the office of later examination (OLE) more quickly. Furthermore, the PPH promotes patent application processing efficiency by allowing the examiner in the OLE to reuse the search and examination results from the office of earlier examination, thereby reducing workload and duplication of effort.
The guidelines of this new PPH program have currently been published only on the USPTO website. The USPTO has also PPH programs running with Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Nicaragua.
Additionally, as previously informed in our blog, on October 15, 2016 Resolution P-56/2016 entered into force in order to speed up the granting procedure of those Argentinian patent applications for which an equivalent patent has been granted by a foreign patent office with similar patentability criteria to those of the INPI.
Source: https://www.uspto.gov
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