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International IP related Activities

Common Application Format

November 2008
Japan Patent Office

The Trilateral Offices (European Patent Office (EPO), Japan Patent Office (JPO) and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)) agreed at the Trilateral Conference in November 2007, on the standardization of formal aspects of patent applications that allows an applicant to file the documents (such as Specification, Claims, Abstracts and Drawings) in a common format (Common Application Format) with each Trilateral Office. The Common Application Format has been created based on the PCT standards. An application prepared in the Common Application Format will be accepted by each Office as a national or regional application without the need for amendments related to formalities. This will provide significant improvement in procedure and cost saving for applicants in the filings and processing of patent applications with the Trilateral Offices.

The Agreement is as follows.

The JPO has created a separate document in relation to the above Agreement, in regards to electronic applications using XML converter as follows. This document will be referred to at the Trilateral Information Technology Group.

The JPO is preparing for the introduction of the Common Application Format on January 1, 2009. The changes concerning the sequence listing to be put in a separate document for the description and the changes concerning the representative drawing selected by the applicant to be moved from the abstract to the application are scheduled for implementation in 2012. In addition the Common Application Format is also scheduled to be adopted for the application documents for utility model registration such as the description.

Please click here (Japanese only) for information on Gazettes format which complies with the Common Application Format.

The implementation status of the Trilateral Offices regarding the Common Application Format is on the Trilateral website page here.

Example of a specification in the Common Application Format.

The following is an example of a specification in the format scheduled to be implemented on January 1, 2009. The new specification format will become officially conclusive with the amendment to the Regulations under the Patent Law, Regulations under the Utility Model Law and the Regulations under the International Application Law and will be officially announced at that time.

Please click here for information about the implementation of the Common Application Format.




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  • (In particular enquires regarding Online Applications using XML Converters)

[Last updated 7 September2009]

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