Two updates from the CNIPA in Nov 2024 - draft government procurement requirements, and IP statistics public enquiry guidelines
Both were announced at about the same time by the CNIPA at the links below in this week:
As always, any thoughts are welcomed.
Government procurement requirements for patent and trademark agency services (draft for comments
This was announced on 27 November 2024, with a commenting deadline on 6 December 2024. I do not believe it is realistic to provide comments (if you do not want it, please do not pretend that you are asking for it). Original Chinese texts are available at the link above, and I have the machine English translation.
Although these requirements are for government procurement, these could also be used during engagement negotiations between private enterprises and patent and trademark agencies, at least as a reference.
While most of the requirements in the draft are sensible and reasonable (like conflict of interest and delay payment of fees are not allowed), there are some interesting requirements, in my view, as below:
1) Specifically spelling out that information on inventors at patent filing should be true and accurate. This may be resulted from the case in which the CNIPA was sued for changing the inventorship after filing without due checking, which also resulted in the recent stringent requirements in the last 2 years on changing inventorship at the CNIPA requiring substantive proof like invention logbook, inventor employment proof, and so on, and merely declaration signed by the old and new inventors is not enough.
2) Specifically mentioning that patent filings should be submitted in XML format. I may have mentioned previously that all patent agencies in China are required to file electronic submissions starting from January 2025. This is a done deal.
3) Designing of a trademark by trademark agency (yes, this is also considered to be part of the potential work of a trademark agency) shall not be identical or similar to the prior trademark, including by copying and reproducing. However, the requirements do not specify how such could be found out and determined, what are the consequences.
4) Quality evaluation is based on the following (only points that caught my eyes are listed below):
Recommended by LinkedIn
• Consideration of agency fees should be about 10-15%, perhaps with the thoughts of not dragging the patent and trademark agencies into a price blood bath battle?
• Not more than 3% of cases involving change of inventors. The reason may be that it was found that many cases involved in government funding scams have such changes.
• Not more than 3% of abnormal patent application.
• Stability of staff. This may encourage better retention of staff at patent and trademark agencies.
• Quality data, which includes patent application number, grant rate, rejection rate, deemed withdrawn rate, success rate in invalidation, average number of claims (independent claims counted separately) in patent applications, and “completeness of patent specification”. First, I do not know what is the meaning of “completeness of patent specification” – are we supposed to file a completed patent specification? Second, the parameters above could not reflect the quality of a patent agent. Take grant rate as an example, this depends on whether the application is handled by a listening and reasoning examiner (good luck), how strong is desire of the applicant (including budget) to defend the scope of the pending claims, how close the prior art document(s) to the relevant claims (no patent search could be totally comprehensive, like it or not, and this also depends on the interpretation of the examiner, which in many cases could be “inventive”), and so on, and I do not see any of these factors are related to the quality of a patent attorney. I am concerned that such requirements would result in gaming the system. For example, if I wanted to increase my grant rate, drafting narrow claims is the way to go, which would also get rid of support and sufficiency defects.
IP statistics public enquiry guidelines
This was announced on 26 November 2024, which should be welcomed as this enhances transparency. Some of my observations are as below:
a) While the numbers of invention patent applications increase from about 1.38 million in 2017 to about 1.68 million in 2023, the numbers from 2017 to 2023 are directed to applications received by the CNIPA (which include those that may not be even allocated an application number), while the numbers before 2017 are directed to applications that were actually accepted by the CNIPA (and therefore allocated an application number). With the substantial cracking down of abnormal patent applications, the actual number of applications accepted by the CNIPA could be much lower. Take 2021 as an example, in November 2021 the CNIPA announced that they took down about 770,000 abnormal applications, in which according to the abive definition, this 770,000 is included in the 1,585,663 filing number in 2021.
b) The numbers of granted invention patents increase significantly from 2017 (about 404k) to 2023 (about 920k). Again, this increase could mean that the CNIPA is receiving narrower and narrower claims, instead of improvements on quality of the patent application received.
c) The number of maintained patents (those that the patentees are paying annual fees to maintain) also increases significantly from 2017 to 2023.
d) Comparing to Chinese invention patent application number (over a million each year), the number of PCT applications filed at the CNIPA is insignificant, in the order of about 70k each year from 2020.