Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH)
The National Board of Patents and Registration of Finland (NBPR) has Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) agreements with several patent offices.
The PPH is a bilateral agreement between two national intellectual property offices. It provides applicants with fast-track patent examination procedures to obtain corresponding patents faster and more efficiently.
Through these agreements, a patent applicant can request accelerated processing at the other office, if the claims in a corresponding application filed with that office have already been allowed by the NBPR. Vice versa, if the other office has already allowed the claims, a patent applicant can request accelerated processing at NBPR.
It is noted that the intellectual property office of second filing is not compelled to accept the opinion of the intellectual property office of first filing and that the intellectual property office of second filing is always solely responsible for its decisions. At the NBPR substantive examination is conducted based on the Finnish patent law and examination guidelines.
PPH will also permit each office to make use of the work previously done by the other office and reduce duplication. Thus, the PPH initiative will reduce the examination workload and improve patent quality.
Background and benefits
In the modern global economy many companies and some individual applicants have a growing need to acquire patent protection for the same invention in a number of different countries. This may require separate patent applications be filed with in many different national intellectual property offices, each considering the patent application independently of the others.
With this in mind, the NBPR has made several PPH agrements with other national intellectual property offices to enable national offices to exploit relevant work already conducted by another national office.
Click here for the NBPR PPH agreements and guidelines for making a request.
Would you like to know more about PPH? Go to the Japan Patent Office website.