HM Treasury commissioned former Financial Times Editor Andrew
Gowers to review the UK's intellectual property laws. Two of the
recommendations in his December 2006 report focussed on the speed
at which patents and trade marks are processed and granted.
Patents
Gowers acknowledged an existing fast-track process for patents.
The process is limited, though, and little used. It allows for
accelerated search and/or examination. But patent applicants must
give "adequate reasons" for using this fast-track service and the
UKIPO's criteria for approving or rejecting such requests are
unclear.
The UKIPO advocates a new accelerated grant process that would
be open to all applicants on payment of a premium of between £300
and £600. It envisages that a typical application could be granted
in under a year under the proposed fast-track process, compared
with two-to-three years for a typical application under the
current, non-accelerated system.
Trade marks
For trade marks there is currently no form of accelerated
examination offered by the UKIPO. Applications are simply examined
in the order in which they are received. Again, Gowers recommended
a fast-track service for a premium fee. "In today’s fast moving
business environment products are regularly launched within short
timescales," said the Gowers Review.
The UKIPO proposes a new system which will enable trade mark
applicants to request examination within 10 business days as
opposed to the 4–6 week timescale a standard application can take
currently.
The current application fees for a trade mark are £200 for an
application (covering one trade mark 'class') and a fee of £50 for
each additional class requested. For a fast-track application the
UKIPO is proposing a fee of £500 for the application (covering one
class); the cost for an additional class will remain at £50.
Lee Curtis, a trade mark attorney with Pinsent Masons, the law
firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said that the accelerated trade mark
procedure will not accelerate the process significantly.
"At present the trade mark process can take from six months to a
few years," said Curtis. "This proposal only shaves a few weeks off
that total period."
Curtis said that UK trade mark applications usually get examined
in around 6 to 8 weeks and the UKIPO has already said that it aims
to examine applications within one month from October. "The new
proposals simply mean that, for an extra payment of £300, an
application will be guaranteed to be examined in 10 days of
filing," he said.
"I'm not sure how attractive that will be because the
applications still have to go through the three-month advertisement
period and other steps," he said. "It's good to have an option for
a faster system, but this is not a radical plan by any means."
The deadline for responses to the consultation is 14th December
2007.
