Discussion Of The Improvement Of The Utility Model Patent Search Report System In China

The third amendment of patent law has been completed on December 27, 2008. The new patent law has begun to implement on October 1, 2009. The amendment of the utility model patent system became the largest one of the focus. The new patent law expanded the target of patent search report,including utility model patents and design patents. The name of the patent search report was changed to patent evaluation report. The contents of patent evaluation report from only the evaluation of whether utility model patent is novelty and creativity was extended to comprehensively evaluation of whether utility model patents meet the authorization conditions under the new patent law. Also,the scope of petitioner was extended to patentee and the interested party. Although the new patent law once again improved utility model patent search report system and will play an important positive role for protecting utility model patent in China,I believe that there are still some issues that need further discussion. This is also the main purpose of the paper.This paper is mainly discussed in the following sections. The first part is discussed the origin and development of the utility model patent search report system, including he origin and development of the utility model patent, the background of the establishment of the utility model patent search report system and so on. The second part is discussed the evaluation of the utility model patent system in representative countries and regions in the world. The fourth part is the focus of the paper, including the legal status of patent evaluation report in patent proceedings remaining unclear, the scope of requesting for patent evaluation report being still not further enlarge, the timing of requesting for patent evaluation report being too restrictive, the opportunity of requesting representations being still limited, the scope of search being still limited and so on. With reference to foreign practice in some countries and in conjunction with our practice of the review,I have made a number of recommendations to further improve the utility model patent search report system.