Patent Prosecution Highway Agreements Extended

The Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) is a route available to Canadian patent applicants for accelerating prosecution of those applications for which a corresponding foreign patent application has already been deemed allowable. In order to be eligible for inclusion in the PPH, a Canadian patent application must have a corresponding patent application that has been examined and deemed allowable in a jurisdiction having a PPH agreement with Canada. There are specific formalities that must be met for acceptance into the PPH, but there is no fee for requesting advanced examination under the PPH projects in Canada.

Recently the Canadian Intellectual Property Office announced that the PPH pilot project agreements between Canada and Denmark, Japan and Korea, which began two years ago, have been extended an additional two years until September 30, 2013. The additional time will be used by the respective patent offices to evaluate whether these PPH projects should be made