A short overview: Turkish PPH practice
Many patent offices strive to gather their work on common ground to offer applicants a faster path to the patenting process, reduce patent office workloads and streamline the examination procedures. This fast-track patent examination procedures are called Patent Prosecution Highway, abbr. PPH.
The PPH begins as a result of the mutual protocol of two patent offices and a mechanism by which positive examination results from one patent office can be submitted to a second patent office to speed up the patent process. In other words, the registration process of a patent application filed for the same invention in a second country’s patent office is accelerated.
The objective of PPH is to facilitate the applicant's worldwide patent obtention at an early stage and to increase the use of search and examination results among Intellectual Property Offices to reduce the burden of examination and improve the quality of examination worldwide.
There are some conditions to get benefit from PPHs:
- It must be the first application corresponding to the application to the second office.
- At least one claim must be patentable in the first application, (the content of the claims must be the same).
- When applying for PPH to the second office, there must be a copy of the claims allowed in terms of patentability in the first application.
- The second office should not have started the examination yet. Participation in the PPH program must be requested.
Turkish PPH practice
Turkey’s Patent Office, Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (TURKPATENT), signed protocols for PPH with JPO (Japanese Patent Office), SPTO (Spanish Patent and Trademark Office) and ROSPATENT (Russian Patent Office). The Turkish PPH practice is limited to the examination reports obtained at the patent offices of these countries only.
TURKPATENT has prepared and published guidelines and forms for PPH requests from SPTO and JPO, which can be downloaded by the following links:
The guidelines are based on the protocolos signed with each Patent Office. A specific guideline and form for PPH requests from ROSPATENT have not yet been provided by TURKPATENT but the similar procedure are applied with other two Offices.
Basically, the following are required for PPH requests at TURKPATENT:
- A copy of the office actions (examination reports) of the protocol country with their translations into Turkish (a good quality of machine translations acceptable).
- A copy of the claims found patentable/allowable by the protocol country.
- A claims correspondence table of the protocol country and Turkish patent applications (indicating the relations between both set of claims).
- Copies of the references cited by the protocol country
There is a specific form for the PPH requests, downloadable here. The form itself provides necessary information about the required documents.
There is no specific official fee for processing the applications under the PPH program. Although there is no official fee associated with PPH requests, the regular official fees (official filing fees, official examination fees etc.) should be paid without any reduction.