I. The TIPO Shortens the Examination Period for Trademark Applications

    As announced by the TIPO on May 25, 2007, the prosecution period of a trademark application from filing to receiving the 1st official notice will be shortened from nine months to eight months. It has come into force from the date of announcement.

II. The Required Document for an Opponent in an Opposition Application Will be Loosened

    According to the Rule 34.1(1) of the present Trademarks Regulations, the opponent shall submit an identification certificate when filing an Opposition application to the TIPO. Because this document was no longer required in a Patent Invalidation application since 2002 and most of the other countries do not require such document either, the TIPO is going to loosen the requirements of the opponent’s identification certificate in an Opposition application as announced on May 7, 2007 in order to be in consistent with the Patent Regulations. Therefore, it may not need to file an opposition request together with the opponent’s identification certificate in the future unless upon request by the registrar Office when it deems necessary.

III. Taiwan Will Adopt the 9^th Edition of the Nice Classification

    According to the information of WIPO, the 9th Edition of the Nice Classification was effective as of January 1, 2007. In order to follow out the principles of adopting International Classification of Goods and Services in Taiwan, TIPO will accordingly amend the current Classification Manual of Taiwan to comply with the International Classification as announced by the TIPO on May 7, 2007.

The More Complete Deliberation System for the Prosecution of an Invalidation Application

    During March 20 to April 3, 2007, the TIPO held a series of seminars for reporting and discussing the present status of the amending Patent Law. One of the most important matters is that there will be a more complete deliberation system for the prosecution of an Invalidation application.

    Presently, the examination procedure of an Invalidation application is carried out based on written arguments. In the draft of the Patent Law, the Oral Argument system will be the principle to proceed with an Invalidation application in order to make the points at dispute much clearer through the arguments and responses between two parties.

    In addition, the time limitation for requesting a voluntary amendment for a patent during the prosecution of an Invalidation application will be regularized specifically to combine the examination procedures of both the voluntary amendment and the invalidation application, so that the examination procedure of the Invalidation application will not be prolonged due to lack of time limitation for filing the request of the voluntary amendment for a patent.

    According to Article 91-1 III of Copyright Act, a person who distributes or with intent to distribute publicly displays or possesses infringing copies of optical disk will commits the offense of copyright no matter he engages for making profits or not. Thus, a person sells the infringing copies of optical disk through Internet, even one, will offense the said copyright act. In addition, based on Article 100 of the same act, the police and prosecutors can actively investigate and take action against the offenses. It is not necessary to be actionable upon complaint.

    In order not to offense the copyright act, the TIPO remind that any disk which you cannot make sure its original source, doesn’t have a printed label on it, or was bought from the roadside at low rate may be pirated edition. Besides not buying it, don’t even sell it through the Internet.