In a recent announcement by the Intellectual Property Office of
Singapore, the Patent Cooperation Treaty-ASEAN Patent Examination
Cooperation ("PCT-ASPEC") will be extended for three
years till 26 August 2025.
Following this announcement, applicants seeking accelerated
patent prosecution in South East Asian jurisdictions can now
continue to enjoy the benefits of the PCT-ASPEC programme. However,
it should be noted that there is a cap of 100 applications per
year.
To re-cap, there are two main programmes for accelerating the
prosecution of patent applications in the nine participating ASEAN
Intellectual Property ("IP") Offices, namely the IP
Offices of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
