Posts Tagged: "national phase"

Founded in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regional organization that aims to “accelerate economic growth, social progress, and sociocultural evolution among its members.” The organization’s membership has subsequently expanded to ten, with the induction of Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. Collectively, the ten economies constitute an economic powerhouse; the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) was the third largest Asian economy and the seventh largest global economy in 2014, as per the ASEAN website. Further, the AEC is expected to grow at a feverish pace of 7% per annum and is touted to be the fourth largest economy in the world by 2030 (Ken Moriyasu; 2016).

A PCT application is an international application that is filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which currently has 151 contracting states. A PCT application is filed with an appropriate Receiving Office within 12 months from the date of first filing (where applicable). The main advantage of a PCT application is that an applicant generally gets 30/31 months from the date of first filing to file individual National Phase applications in jurisdictions of interest. However, one must consider the costs associated with the PCT Process.

In several jurisdictions across the globe, the costs are a function of various variables such as the mode of filing, the type of applicant, the number of pages of the specification and claims, and the number of claims/independent claims/multiple dependent claims. The costs generally have three components (official, associate/attorney, and translation) that are spread across the different stages of the patenting process (filing, examination and prosecution, grant, and maintenance or renewal or annuity). For instance, let us consider a PCT application filed by a large entity comprising 50 pages (including 5 pages of drawings and 10 pages of claims) and 20 claims (including 3 independent claims) which is to be electronically filed in the top 10 jurisdictions, namely Canada (CA), China (CN), European Patent Office (EP), Israel (IL), India (IN), Iran (IR), Japan (JP), South Korea (KR), Russia (RU), and the United States (US)