International Activities

Opinion Exchange with Brazilian, Egyptian, and Indian Examiners in 2016

On October 18, 2016, we held an opinion exchange meeting with Brazilian, Egyptian, and Indian examiners who came to Japan to take the patent examination practicing course, at the Asia-Pacific IP Center of the Japan Institute of Invention and Innovation. This meeting has continued to be held since 2009 in order to allow working-level people of companies and IP-related offices to make discussions while presenting individual views every year.

The participants of this meeting were 6 Indian examiners, 2 Egyptian examiners, 2 Brazilian examiners, as well as a total of 8 JIPA members from the International First Committee, the International Fourth Committee, the Information Search Committee, the Asian Strategic PJ team, and the secretariat.

In this meeting, JIPA first introduced its activities and then asked the Brazilian examiners about the current status of the examination practice and examples of infringement proceedings and asked the Egyptian examiners about data on the examination period and allowance rate, and their tendency. Additionally, JIPA obtained information on the current situation of India, in particular, a significant increase in the number of examiners, and discussed the education for them and the expectation for faster examination. The examiners responded carefully to each question from JIPA, and the remaining time was accordingly insufficient to respond to questions from the examiners. JIPA therefore sent reply documents to the examiners later.

We obtained frank opinions from the examiners of all of the above countries. The meeting was a meaningful one fit for the intended purpose.

• Back