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PPH - Patent Prosecution Highway

With PPH the patent proceedings can be accelerated in over 25 countries.

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What you need to know

Via the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH), you can accelerate the internationalization of you application. Applicants applying for a patent at one of the participating offices qualify for the PPH-program: they can request accelerated examination of their application as soon as the claims have been determined to be patentable by the Office of Earlier Examination (OEE). The partner offices are not bound by the result of the earlier examination, but make use of them for a faster processing of the application. Thereby, the quality of examination is increased and you profit from a speedier, more efficient patent application process.

The Austrian Patent Office’s partner offices

The Austrian Patent Office has signed PPH-agreements with the following partner offices for you:

Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China (extended from March 1st 2021), Colombia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the Nordic Patent Institute (Denmark, Norway, Iceland), Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the UK, the USA, the Visegrad Patent Institute (Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary).

In all of these offices, you can profit from the accelerated examination procedure.

Is your target country missing? Let us know – we always seek to expand our network, giving you access to a more efficient procedure in all your target countries!  

Principle of PPH

Principle of PCT-PPH

PPH is also available in the course of PCT-Proceedings(PCT- PPH). A PPH-request can, thus, also be based on a PCT work product (Written Opinion of the International Searching Authority (ISA) or International Preliminary Examination Report of the International Preliminary Examining Authority (IPEA)).

Requirements/ necessary documents

The following requirements must be met for a PPH-Request:

  1. First and second application must claim the same priority.
  2. One or more claims must have been determined as patentable by the Office of Earlier Examination (OEE).
  3. All claims in the application for which PPH was requested must be part of the other, examined application.
  4. The Office of Later Examination (OLE) did not perform the substantive examination/did not issue the decision to grant yet.

The following documents must be transmitted to the OLE with the PPH-application:

  1. Copies of all office actions by the OEE. Upon request, the Austrian Patent Office compiles your personal PPH-package with these documents for you (requests with application number to be sent to info@patentamt.at).
  2. Copies of all examined claims.
  3. A claim correspondence table.
  4. Copies of relevant documents (e.g. non-patent literature).

Details regarding the requirements and documents of a certain patent office can be found in the respective office's guidelines.

Your personal PPH-package

You are planning to apply for PPH at one of our partner offices? You can request your personal PPH-package at the Austrian Patent Office, in which we compile the required copies of the office actions for you – if necessary with a machine translation to English.

To apply for your personal PPH-package, simply send an e-mail with your request and your application number to info@patentamt.at.

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