Procedures Adopted by the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office to Reduce the Backlog of Patent Application Examinations

The rising volume of patent applications filed with the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BPTO) raises an issue that has been in discussion for some time: its enormous backlog, that is to say, the huge number of patent applications that have been filed but not yet undergone substantive examination.

Currently, the BPTO’s Technical Divisions are examining patent applications filed between 1998 and 2001. This backlog is because for the last three to four years the number of examiners on the Examination Division’s technical staff has been way too low.

Given this situation, the BPTO recently hired examiners based on a public competition. We can measure the direct result of this increase to approximately 240 examiners by analyzing the statistics of the notifications published in reference to patent application examinations, namely: Office actions, unfavourable opinions and rejections, which increased by approximately 70% from 2006 to 2007.

The BPTO’s productivity with regards to patent application examinations has been growing each year. From the first week of 2009 to the last week of August of this year, the number of notifications published in the Industrial Property Journal (RPI) already corresponds to 73.54% of the total published last year. The total number of these will certainly increase significantly in 2009 as compared to 2008.

Although since August of 2009 it has been acting as the International Search Authority (ISA) for the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) – a duty assigned it by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office insists that this new responsibility will not jeopardize processing of patent applications filed in Brazil.

The technical staff’s qualifications and experience, plus restructuring of the BPTO’s internal flow designed to obtain application decisions in the shortest time possible without sacrificing service quality, are the cornerstones of the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office’s strategy for accelerating this backlog reduction. In this regard, the BPTO plans to be examining applications filed in 2011 by the year 2015.

Still, the BPTO believes that the strategies noted above would be best served by increasing the number of examiners even more. Based on this, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT) approved another public competition to hire seventy more examiners, which underscores the BPTO’s efforts to reduce the current patent application backlog. In the next six years, the BPTO expects to reduce from ten to four years the time for examination to begin of a patent application in Brazil. When realized, this reduction will bring patent application processing in Brazil in line with that of Europe.