November 14, 2012, 18th Industry Trilateral was held in Kyoto, Japan. The discussion was taken with twelve issues regarding the harmonization of prior art search and examination. The fall meeting of IT is usually held as a pre-meeting of the “Trilateral Offices and Users meeting”. However, present meeting discussed many issues because the harmonization activities by relating group, has been active, like, law amendment and/or improvement of many procedural matters. JIPA has been promoting the theory, “4 same”,“step by step approach”for ten years. Regarding the major issue of the discussion related to the “same search” as the second step, “same examination” as the third step of them. In detailed, report and discussion were done under the analysis of the procedure among the search and the domestic examination of the PCT application, comparison of written description requirement of trilateral offices, analysis of the patent classification as CPC applying at U.S and Europe, the sharing system for the information of the examination, etc.
Regarding the harmonization, IT discussed the comparison between the U/S Grace period and EP/ JP‘s relating system.
Finally, IT decided to request to the Office that the meetings between IT and Office should be arranged efficiently though the activity were expanded form trilateral offices to IP5 including Korea and China member.