Patent Offices of Australia, UK and Canada have recently reached an agreement for cooperating in patent prosecution. The agreement, known as the Vancouver Group Agreement, allows these countries to expedite patent examination more efficiently than procedures such as Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH).
PPH is currently available between Canada, UK. Germany. Europe, Australia, Japan and South Korea. The PPH procedure has some serious disadvantages. To request for an accelerated examination of an application in a patent office, based on a PPH, the application should be filed in the country in which a corresponding application is granted first. This means that the applicant is required to plan his filing chronology carefully to be able to rely on a PPH for accelerating examination. The biggest of all disadvantages of the PPH procedure is that it only enables requesting for an acceleration in beginning to examine the application relying on a grant of a corresponding application and does not allow skipping main examination steps such as the search and review thereof and therefore does not really save much time and/or money for the applicant as well as for the patent office. The Vancouver Group Agreement overcomes these disadvantages.
According to the Vancouver Group Agreement, each patent office in the group can rely on examination of another patent office in the group when examining a corresponding application. This means that if a corresponding application was filed in more than one of these countries and if these applications are related, a first patent office can rely on examination results such as search results and/or allowance of the other patent office instead of initiating a whole new examination procedure. The procedure is indifferent to first filing; meaning that it does not matter in which patent office the application was filed first as long as they are related. The Vancouver Group Agreement allows these patent offices to save precocious time and money for the patentees while saving working hours of the examiners.
This does not mean that a patent office of this group is obliged to allow the claims which were granted or allowed by another patent office, but that the patent office can skip one or more steps of the examination procedure if it chooses to do so, under its own criteria.
We can only hope that more countries will join this agreement especially the US, where the process is slow and cumbersome.