New Chinese Patent Law Protects Partial Designs

The newly revised design patent regulations came into effect on June 1, 2021, introducing two important changes for the design applications filed on/after today, the partial design becoming patentable and design patent term extended to 15 years.

Partial design

IP owners can file design patent applications for partial designs now. But it is unclear how partial design applications are to be examined since the detailed implementing rules and examination guidelines have not been released yet.

Under such circumstance we provide the following suggestions to assist you in filing partial designs before any specific guidelines become available:

• If your prior design application filed is a partial design, you can file the Chinese partial design application straight with the same views first, and then make further amendments to the views when any issue is raised by the Chinese examiners.