Articles and Information

As announced on July 4, 2024, the Brazilian PTO joined the Global Patent Prosecution Highway (Global PPH/GPPH) program on July 6, 2024, aiming to optimize patent processes and increase Brazil’s insertion in the global intellectual property system.

GPPH is a pilot program of plurilateral examination for priority prosecution of patent applications, which was launched on January 6, 2014, led by the Japanese Patent Office (JPO), initially with the participation of 17 patent offices around the world. Currently, the program has 28 participating offices.

Thus, the result of the examination carried out by any of the offices adhering to the GPPH can be shared to request priority examination of the prosecution of a corresponding application in any other of the aforementioned offices, including the results obtained under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

However, in 2022, the offices of the United States (USPTO), Canada (CIPO), Japan (JPO) and Germany (DPMA) announced that they would no longer grant priority examination in their offices based on the result of an examination carried out by the Russian Patent Office (ROSPATENT).

Historically, the first pilot project for priority examination PPH was established on January 11, 2016 between the Brazilian PTO and the United States Patent Office (USPTO), according to Resolution n°. 154/15.

Currently, the Brazilian PTO is in the fourth phase of the shared PPH examination pilot project, which began on January 1, 2023 and will be in effect until December 31, 2025. However, less than two weeks after the announcement of the adhesion to GPPH, the Brazilian PTO announced that the fourth phase of PPH was suspended, given that the limit of 800 participation requests per annual cycle had been reached, as established by Ordinance n°. 78/2022. Therefore, no new requests for PPH will be accepted in 2024 and, in principle, new requests may be made as of January 1, 2025.

It is worth remembering that, on March 7, 2024, the Brazilian PTO had already announced that the limit of 100 requests per annual cycle using PCT results to expedite examination of patent applications had already been reached.

However, in the interval between the start of the new annual cycle and the effective use of the GPPH, the Brazilian PTO is preparing a new ordinance to be published soon regulating the procedure related to the GPPH, which may revoke the ordinance related to the fourth phase of the PPH.

In short, applicants must now await new developments from the Brazilian PTO regarding the PPH, an excellent tool for expediting prosecution of patent applications that has proven to be extremely interesting and reliable, often reducing the prosecution time of an application by half.

Fabio Albergaria Dias