The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) has issued
an update to the Examination Guidelines for Patent Applications on
March 2020 to provide further guidance on validity of priority
claims and lack of unity objections.
Validity of priority
In assessing whether an invention in an application may be
accorded its claimed priority date from an earlier application,
IPOS has clarified that the focus of the assessment is on whether
the earlier application, directly and unambiguously as a whole,
while taking into account the common general knowledge of the
skilled person, discloses the invention in the concerned
application whose priority is in question. The disclosure may be
explicit or implicit, and must enable the skilled person to work
the invention in the concerned application.
