The Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) is a process in which a national patent office can adopt the conclusions of an examination carried out by another national patent office in order to accelerate a patent application's path to registration. The PPH allows each participating patent office to benefit from the work already conducted by another patent office and helps obtain corresponding patents faster and more efficiently. The application must meet certain PPH requirements, and it is the patent attorney's job to make sure that the PPH is applied to your application in a way that is most cost-efficient. If a patent application meets these requirements, it can get into a fast-track examination process, resulting in earlier registration of your patent.
There are five conditions for an application for entry into the Accelerated Examination Track in the framework of the PPH pilot program, as follows:
- The Israeli patent application:
- claims priority in accordance with the Paris Convention from an application filed in another national patent office;
- claims priority in accordance with the Paris Convention from a number of applications filed in another national patent office;
- constitutes a divisional application of one of the cases detailed in (a) or (b) above.
- The Israeli application from which priority is claimed contains one or more claims which were accepted by another national patent office.
- All the claims, as original filed or amended, of the application being examined in the framework of the PPH program must be sufficiently compatible with the claims accepted by the other national Patent Office.
Claims which are identical or similar in scope to the claims accepted by the other national patent office will be considered sufficiently compatible.
- Examination of the patent application has not yet commenced in the Israeli Patent Office at the time of filing an application to enter the Accelerated Examination Track. Ask Dr. Sharona Lahav to learn more about entering your patent application into an Accelerated Examination Track in the framework of the PPH.
