EPO and INPI Brazil to further enhance their co-operation
By José Santacroce, Partner, and Head of Patent Department
The European Patent Office (EPO) and the National Institute of Industrial Property of Brazil (INPI) have agreed to work towards enhancing their co-operation. EPO President António Campinos and Claudio Vilar Furtado, President of INPI, signed on 22 July 2019 a Joint Statement in this direction following a bi-lateral consultation that formed part of a series of meetings between the EPO and IP offices from the Community of Portuguese Language Countries. They also signed an agreement renewing the INPI’s access to EPOQUE Net, the EPO’s dedicated patent searching tool that contains more than 1.3 billion database entries.
In their Joint Statement, the two Heads of Office agreed to work together towards a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) establishing a pilot project aimed at strengthening the INPI’s capacity for searching and examining patent applications.
President Campinos underlined the importance of co-operation with INPI: “I am pleased to sign this Joint Statement today. As traditionally, Brazil has been an important co-operation partner for the EPO in Latin America. The INPI has great expertise in the patent grant procedure, and with today’s signatures we are paving the way to a closer relationship between our offices, …
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Comunicado INPI Brazil
Con el objetivo de mejorar su infraestructura de Tecnología de la Información (TI) y reducir costos operativos, el INPI realizará la transferencia de todos los equipos de su Datacenter a otra ubicación. En razón de este procedimiento, será necesario interrumpir el funcionamiento del Instituto y de sus sistemas entre las 0h del día 05 de junio y las 23h59 del día 10 de junio de 2019.
La interrupción en el funcionamiento de todos los sistemas del INPI y, en consecuencia, de su Portal en Internet, es esencial para garantizar la copia de seguridad y la seguridad de todos los activos que serán transportados a la nueva ubicación.
El INPI asegura que no habrá perjuicios a los usuarios y todos los plazos vencidos en el período serán devueltos del 11 al 14 de junio de 2019. El Instituto mantendrá al público informado por el Portal, antes y después, y por sus Redes Sociales durante todo el procedimiento.
La transferencia de Datacenter a un nuevo espacio, más adecuado para la infraestructura de TI del Instituto, seguirá los estándares internacionales de seguridad de la información, climatización, prevención de incendios y suministro de energía eléctrica, con aumento de disponibilidad, estabilidad y confiabilidad. Los …
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Brazilian Senate Approves Special Protection Bill of “High Reputation” Brands
By Carlos Cavalcanti, Managing Partner Moeller IP Brazil
The Brazilian Senate Plenary approved on Tuesday (2) the bill that creates rules for special protection of “high reputation” brands. PLC 86/2015 allows the holder of an industrial trademark to request the Brazilian PTO (Inpi) to recognize this title at any time. The text has been modified and will have to be returned to the Chamber of Deputies.
“High reputation” is a classification that guarantees a brand protection in all markets, not just the one in which it operates. With this recognition, no other company can be registered with the same name, even if it is from another branch. Inpi currently recognizes 41 “high reputation” brands.
PLC 86/2015 regulates the Industrial Property Law (Law 9.279 / 96) to specify that “high reputation” may be requested at any time. Currently, only an INPI internal standard addresses this issue. According to the rule, the interested parties must wait for a third party to request the registration of the same mark in another branch.
The text also determines that, in case of approval of the application, the recognition of its “high reputation” will be noted in the trademark register. Thus, the owner of the …
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Brazilian PTO Continues its efforts to Improve Performance Output
By Maria Belen Priore, Patents Department
We hereby inform the last news published by the Brazilian INPI’s official gazette in the past two weeks.
We would like to highlight two new rules, in where we found special interest that may benefit our clients.
The Official Gazette number 2515 launched a Resolution under number 236/19 that establishes the beginning of phase IV of the pilot project to accelerate examination for small and medium-sized Brazilian companies.
Official Gazette number 2516 publishes a normative instruction that aims to improve the Brazilian INPI’s performance, regarding the appeals submitted against rejections of trademarks and industrial designs, which are still pending of resolution, due to the backlog suffered.
The INPI launched this new normative instruction under number 101/19 which encourages the sectors that are responsible, to solve 31.000 pending resolutions in a year’s time.
This normative instruction establishes new transitory rules, including the issuance of a decree that will be dictated by the sectors DIRMA (Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications Direction) and CGREC (General Coordinator of Appeals and Administrative Proceedings of nullity). This decree will determine criteria to be applied in order to comply with this instruction, and shall be issued as soon as …
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Collaboration Between Brazilian PTO and CAS to Fight Patent Backlog with the Help of AI
By Marta García
On January 8, 2019, the Brazilian National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) and CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society that specializes in scientific information solutions, announced that they have initiated a collaboration to speed up the patent examination process at INPI through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
CAS´s AI solution combines scoring similarity, workflow classification and knowledge-space exploration capabilities to provide patent examiners with a comprehensive set of prior art in the relevant field of technology, as well as information already published that may be relevant to the examination, helping to expedite the examination process.
“CAS´s technology can help INPI examiners quickly uncover relevant scientific information, a promising development for shortening the time of patent application processing,” said Luiz Otávio Pimentel, former President of INPI.
As recently reported in our blog, according to the INPI´s 2018 Activity Report, the average decision time for patent applications in Brazil is currently 10 years, with pharma and IT patent applications reaching a maximum average of 13 years.
Therefore, this collaboration with CAS is among the several measures that the INPI has been implementing since 2016 with the aim of tackling one of the biggest patent …
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INPI Brazil – New Rule on Patent examination
By José Santacroce, Head of Patent Department
On 30 October 2018, the Brazilian National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) in order to reduce its current backlog published Rule 227/2018, regulating for the analysis of patents using the results of searches in other national or regional patent offices.
The Rule is applicable to patent applications which:
1. have not already been submitted to technical examination of the INPI;
2. have not applied to any other form of priority examination by the INPI;
3. have not received any pre-grant opposition;
4. have a counterpart application with prior art searches realized by national or regional patent offices in other countries.
Once the above conditions are fulfilled, the INPI will publish an opinion (under code 06.20) setting out prior art documents cited by foreign patent offices and inviting applicant to submit a new set of claims and/or arguments as to the patentability of the claimed invention. Thereafter, the applicant will have 60 days from the date of publication to answer such queries.
The new Rule is based on the findings of an existing pilot program introduced in January 2018, with the objective of evaluating the possible simplification and streamlining of technical procedures for examination …
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