Worksharing

As the demand for patents increases across the world patent backlogs are steadily growing, increasing the strain on the patent system.

The rise in patent applications can be partially attributed to multiple filings. Patents are territorial and patent protection is granted within national borders. With increased globalisation, innovators often seek patent protection in several countries important to their market. This means that the same patent application is examined many times over by examiners in different IP offices.

Worksharing is a way of reducing the duplication of examination work by patent offices around the world. Worksharing means that if one IP office has already performed patent processing work on an application, a second office, considering the same application, will use that work to the maximum extent possible. The aim is to reduce the amount of duplicated processing as much as possible and, by doing so, reduce backlogs.

The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is involved in a number of worksharing initiatives.

  • In 10 March 2010, the IPO and United States Patent Office (USPTO) announced a 3 year worksharing collaboration aimed at re-using each others examination work to the maximum extent possible.
  • The Vancouver group is a collaborative initiative with the Intellectual Property offices of Australia, Canada and the UK working together to explore how each can benefit from work carried out by the other offices.
  • WIPO CASE is a database for information sharing allowing, initially, Australia, Canada, and the UK to use search and exam reports from the other offices. A pilot by the Vancouver group assisted in the development of the new database available from March 2011.
  • The Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) is an initiative where applicants can significantly accelerate examination of patent applications if examination has already been conducted at another intellectual property office with a PPH agreement.
  • The Patent Cooperation treaty (PCT) provides a unified procedure for filing and searching patent applications which covers over 140 countries. The UK is heavily involved in the current PCT reform.