Patent application submission and acceptance

1. Patent application acceptance authority

The Patent Law stipulates that: The Patent Office of the People's Republic of China (now known as the State Intellectual Property Office, the same below) shall accept and examine patent applications and grant patent rights to inventions that meet the legal requirements.

The State Intellectual Property Office is China's patent authority and the only authority that has the right to receive patent applications. When applying for a patent, the applicant shall submit the application documents directly to the Intellectual Property Office (referred to as the Patent Office for short). If the applicant mistakenly submits the application documents to other agencies, units or individuals, it will not produce legal effects in the patent examination and approval procedures.

The Patent Office has set up a Patent Office and a Patent Application Reception Window, and has established Patent Office Offices in Shenyang, Jinan, Changsha, Chengdu, Nanjing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xian and Wuhan to receive and accept patent applications and other documents. The address and business scope of work of the Office of Chinese Patent Office and the Office of the above-mentioned agency shall be issued by the Chinese Patent Office to the public in the form of an announcement.

2. Submission of application documents

When applying for patents or other procedures with the Patent Office, the application documents or other documents may be submitted directly to the Patent Office's application acceptance window or any of the above-mentioned agencies. They may also be mailed to the Office of the Patent Office or the above-mentioned agency. When submitting documents, please note the following:

(1) The documents submitted to the patent office or for various formalities shall use the forms uniformly formulated by the Patent Office, and each document shall be in duplicate.

(2) A form can only be used for one patent application. For example, a request for invention patent can only fill one invention, and a statement of opinion can only state opinions on a patent application. It is not permissible to include a few statements of the application or several inventions in a statement of opinion or a patent application for invention.

(3) Applicants for various documents submitted to the Patent Office shall retain the manuscript to ensure consistency in the filing of documents during the application approval process, and may use this as a reference for answering the review opinions.

(4) If the application documents are mailed, they should be registered. If you cannot mail by registered mail, you may send it by express mail and do not use parcels to mail the application documents. In addition to specifying the detailed address (including zip code) of the patent office or agency, the registered letter should also be marked with the words “application document” and “Patent Office Acceptance Office” or “Patent Office XX Agency Office”.

A registered letter should only contain the same application or other documents. When sending mail, the applicant should ask the staff of the post office to clear the date of the postmark and properly maintain the registered receipt of the registered letter.

(5) The patent office does not accept samples, samples or models when accepting patent applications. In the review procedure, when the applicant requests the submitting of a sample or model by the examiner, the applicant shall submit a notice of the examination opinion if presented by the examiner at the window of the patent office; the mailing shall indicate on the e-mail that “the examiner*××(name) Request to submit model".

(6) When foreigners or foreign entities that do not have long-term residences or establishments in China, and Chinese who have lived or worked abroad for a long time apply for a patent, they shall entrust the State Council to authorize the foreign-related patent agency designated by the Patent Office to handle the application. The above applicants may not directly mail or submit application documents to the Patent Office.

Applications for patents by units or compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan regions should also be entrusted to foreign-related patent agencies or domestic patent agencies in accordance with the regulations. They must not directly mail or submit them to the Patent Office.

3. Patent application acceptance and acceptance conditions

After the patent application is submitted to the Patent Office's acceptance office or agencies, it is first necessary to check whether or not it meets the conditions for acceptance. For applications that meet the conditions for acceptance, the Patent Office will determine the application date, give the application number, and after verifying the list of documents, issue a notice of acceptance to notify the applicant and confirm receipt of the application.

If the patent application has one of the following circumstances, the Patent Office will not accept it, notify the applicant and return the application documents.

(1) The patent application has not been submitted in the form of a situation, or has not been written in Chinese and cannot be accepted. For example, filing a patent application with a model, a sample, a videotape, a diskette, or by telephone is inadmissible, and an untranslated foreign language application may not be accepted.

(2) The application documents (including the request) have not been typed, printed, or are illegible or altered; drawings or designs have not been drawn with drawing tools and black ink, or are vague (design photos), We cannot accept change. For example, drawings and pictures drawn with pencils and fuzzy photos are inadmissible.

(3) The basic application documents are not complete, such as missing application for invention or utility model patent application, specification (the utility model is absent from the drawing), or any of the claims are missing; design patent application missing request, picture or Any one of the photographs cannot be accepted. For example, an application for a utility model patent only submitted a request, a description and a claim, and if it is not submitted, it cannot be accepted. However, the examination of the admissibility criteria only checks whether the patent application is complete or not and does not review the completeness of the documents in each part. For example, the description should have 15 pages. The applicant submitted only 1 to 3 pages and 5 pages. It can still be accepted when the application is accepted. The reception desk only indicated that 4 pages of the manual were received on the document list. This defect is often unrecoverable, so applicants must carefully check the application documents.

(4) In the request, the applicant's name or name is missing and the address is unknown. For example, if the request is in a non-standard format, only the name of the invention and the name of the inventor are listed. There is no name and address of the applicant. Since the patent application has no applicant, the request cannot be accepted.

(5) The type of patent application (invention, utility model or design) is unclear or indefinable and cannot be accepted. For example, the applicant submitted a design request, but did not submit a picture or a photo, but submitted the specification and drawings. Since the design application did not need to submit the specification, it was not possible to determine what kind of patent the applicant was going to apply for during the review, and Because of the kind of patent application requirements, it is not accepted.

(6) A national or unit of a country that has no agreement or treaty relationship with China and no patent reciprocity, and the application submitted to China is inadmissible; or foreigners or foreign units that do not have regular residences or establishments in China, and Units and compatriots in the Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan regions fail to handle the application procedures as required, and cannot be accepted. For example, a Chinese citizen in Hong Kong directly sends a patent application document to the China Patent Office. This is inadmissible.

Some defects in the application documents do not affect the acceptance. For example: 1 The application document has not been printed in a form uniformly printed by the Patent Office. It is typed or printed on white paper in accordance with the requested item; 2 The name of the invention and the name of the inventor are missing in the request; 3 There is no signature in the request. Or the signature does not produce legal effects, such as a signature by a patent agency, but no power of attorney is also submitted at the same time; 4 In addition to the request, the list of other application documents, if submitted only one from the (application documents need to submit two Copies, one of which is used as a list of documents. If only one copy is submitted, the applicant will not be provided with a list of documents. The above deficiencies can be corrected at the examination stage, but the applicant should try to avoid these deficiencies because the replenishment often delays the review process. The defects that can be resolved within a few minutes before the application can be corrected by delaying the review process for several months. For the applicant's application documents submitted to the Patent Office's admissibility office or agency office, the staff of the admissibility office or agency office then conducts a review of whether the application meets the conditions for acceptance and the formalities for accepting the application are met on the spot; if the application does not meet the conditions for acceptance, the patent At that time, the bureau returned the application documents to the applicant and explained the reason for the inadmissibility. If the application documents are sent to the Patent Office, the notice of acceptance or non-acceptance of the Patent Office and the returned application documents shall be received within approximately one month. If the notice has not been received for more than one month, the applicant shall promptly consult the Office of Patent Office to avoid the loss of the application documents or notices.

4. Determination of filing date and application number

There are two most important legal procedures in the procedure: First, decide whether the application can be handled; second, determine the application date of the accepted application and give the application number.

(1) Determination of filing date

The filing date has a very important legal significance: 1 It determines the order of submission of applications, in accordance with the principle of the first application, when the application has the same content, the application has determined the grant of the patent right; 2 it determines the existing technology The starting point of the search time, which in the review is to determine whether the application has a significant patentability; 3 The application date is the starting point of a series of relevant deadlines in the review process.

According to the provisions of the Patent Law, if the applicant directly submits the application documents to the Patent Office's admissibility office or agency office, it will be reviewed on the spot. If the applicant meets the conditions for acceptance, the filing date will be determined as the filing date.

If the application documents sent by the applicant are in conformity with the conditions for acceptance, the mailing date shall be the filing date. If the date of the mailmarked postmark is unclear, the postmark date sent by mail to the Patent Office will be the filing date. The postmark of the mail is not clear and the date of receipt by the Patent Office is the filing date.

(2) Change of application date

After the application date is confirmed, it cannot be changed casually. Change of filing date is allowed only in the following two cases:

1 As the postmark is unclear and the Patent Office uses the date of receipt as the date of filing, or if the applicant believes that the filing date fixed by the Patent Office is incorrect, the applicant may provide a registered receipt or other evidence for sending out the application document, requesting the Patent Office to correct it. . After the Patent Office has verified the verification, it may change the filing date.

2 For a patent application that has already been filed, the applicant himself or after examining it by the Patent Office found that the description was attached to the drawing in the description. However, if the applicant did not actually submit or gave up the drawing, the applicant could take the initiative to make a payment or pick up. After the notice of correction by the Patent Office, the attached drawings will be submitted within a specified period of time. Where it is required to submit the drawings as required, the date of filing of the application shall be determined as the filing date of the application. Where the application date is changed, the Patent Office shall promptly notify the applicant.

(3) Grant of application number

The application number is the code given by the patent office to each accepted patent application. It is a one-to-one correspondence with the patent application. Therefore, the application number is the most effective means for specifying the application when the applicant handles various procedures with the Patent Office.

China's patent application number consists of 9 digits (including characters). It is divided into four paragraphs: for example, .4 The first paragraph is the first two digits, indicating the year in which the patent application is filed. For example, "97" indicates the application filed in 1997; the second paragraph consists of the third digit, indicating the type of patent application. , "1" indicates invention (if "2" indicates utility model, "3" indicates design); the third paragraph consists of fourth to eighth positions, indicating the number of serial numbers of such applications in the current year, such as 01765 indicating that year 1765 Application; the fourth paragraph consists of a digit or symbol of the ninth digit, which is the computer check digit. It may be any digit from 0 to 9, or the character X, such as "4" in the example.

The Patent Office shall record the application number given on the determined application date in the acceptance notice and notify the applicant.

5. Legal effect of acceptance notice and documents

For applications that meet the conditions for acceptance, the Patent Office issues a notice of acceptance at the end of the acceptance process. The main content and role of the acceptance notice are:

(1) Formally confirming that the patent application submitted by the applicant meets the conditions for acceptance and makes a decision on acceptance. Therefore, the acceptance notice may serve as a kind of proof that a patent application was filed with the patent office.

(2) To notify the applicant of the patent application of the date of application for the application determined by the Patent Office and the number of applications given. This is an important two data for the applicants to handle various procedures. It will be used many times and applicants should check them carefully. For example, if an application is made for an invention, it shall be checked whether the application number is invented or not. If the patent office mistakenly gives it to a utility model or design, it shall promptly request the patent office to make a correction.

(3) At the time of issuance of a notification of acceptance, a list of application documents verified by the Patent Office is attached. This is the proof that the applicant submitted to the Patent Office. However, according to the provisions of the Patent Office, only the submission of two copies of the request is issued to the document.