Regarding Office Actions or Notifications of Acceptance after 2007 that do not Include a Search Report
2007/05/02 TaiwanIn order to improve the quality and clarity of examination for patents, a search report will be included in the Office Action and the notifications of acceptance starting Jan. 1, 2007 except for the following applications,
1.Patent applications that have already requested for substantial examination. Since Office Actions or notices of amendment issued before 2007 were compared with prior cases and contained analytical results, the notifications already employed the functions of a search report. Therefore, a search report will not be included when a decision is concluded for the aforementioned patent applications.
2.If the applications or the claims are under any of the following circumstances, the examiner will notify the applicants regarding the articles they failed to comply. If the following situations can be overcome after the applicant filed an appeal or an amendment, a search report will be included along with the Office Actions in the examinations that follows. On the other hand, if the applicant does not file for an appeal, amendments, or still fail to comply with the articles, a search report will not be included in the following examinations.
◆Failure to comply with Article 21, which states that the term "invention" refers to any creation of technical concepts by utilizing the rules of nature.
◆Sections in Article 24 that cannot be granted as a patent.
◆The description of invention does not contain a sufficiently clear and complete disclosure of contents of the invention to enable person skilled in the art to understand the contents of and to practice said invention. (paragraph 2 of Article 26)
◆When an invention is not industrially applicable. (Article 22)
◆When two or more applications are filed for the same invention. (Article 31)
Failure to comply with Article 32, “an application for a patent for invention shall be limited to one invention.” In the case of a patent application which substantially involves two or more inventions, the application may, upon notice given by the Patent Authority or the request by the applicant, be divided into two or more separate divisional applications. Applications can not be divided when they failed to comply with the requirements for filing a divisional application. (Article 33)
(from IPO 2007/05/02)
translated by Emily Xue
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