What is the IP5 Cooperation?
The IP5 Cooperation is a multilateral forum comprising the world’s five largest intellectual property (IP) offices: the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japan Patent Office (JPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the National Intellectual Property Administration of the People’s Republic of China (CNIPA), and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Collectively, these offices handle about 90% of patent applications worldwide and 95% of all work under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).
The IP5 forum was established in 2007 to improve the efficiency of the patent examination process. The IP5 Offices exchange views and identify opportunities for cooperation on common challenges, including patent examination workloads, backlogs, patent quality, and inefficiencies in the international patent system. The leaders of the IP5 Offices meet annually at the IP5 Meeting of the Heads of Office to discuss strategic topics of mutual interest and endorse the progress of IP5 projects. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) attends the IP5 annual meetings as an observer.
IP5 Industry
The IP5 Offices engage formally with representatives of industry groups from the IP5 jurisdictions—known collectively as the IP5 Industry—to update them on important recent developments and to discuss intellectual property issues, including in strategic areas such as new emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, and the future work of the IP5.
The IP5 Industry groups are the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), Business Europe (BE), the International Property Owners Association (IPO), the Japan Intellectual Property Association (JIPA), the Korea Intellectual Property Association (KINPA), and the Patent Protection Association of China (PPAC). The IP5 Heads and IP5 Industry meeting is held the same week as the IP5 Heads of Office meeting. The meeting provides an opportunity for the IP5 Offices to give a general update from their respective offices to IP5 Industry groups and to engage in discussions on agreed-upon strategic topics.
IP5 foundation projects
Based on the forum’s original vision to a) eliminate unnecessary duplication of work among the offices, b) enhance patent examination efficiency and quality, and c) guarantee the stability of patent rights, major results from the first 10 years of IP5 cooperation include:
- Global Dossier, a set of business services providing IP stakeholders free, secure, one-stop access to the dossier information of all applications that comprise a family and have been filed in participating offices
- Common Citation Document (CCD), a compilation of citation data relating to a patent family treated by the IP5 Offices, available online, free of charge, and on a single page
- IP5 Common Application Format (CAF), a standardized format for various application sections with the respective IP5 offices
- Priority Document Exchange (PDX), a program to exchange documents between offices, thus reducing the burden associated with ordering, filing, and transmitting certified priority documents to separate foreign IP offices
- IP5 Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH), a method to accelerate the examination and prosecution process for corresponding applications in IP5 offices
- IP5 Patent Information Policy, a framework for exchanging and disseminating patent information in the IP5 region
- IP5 Global Dossier Task Force and the IP5 Industry Consultation Group, which provide platforms for incorporating users’ views on technical projects
- IP5 Quality Management Meeting (QMM), a platform for the IP5 Offices to share quality management experiences, with an aim to deliver high-quality products to the users
- Mutual Machine Translation (MMT), an initiative to provide fast, automatic translations of documents in the IP5 languages
IP5 new and emerging technologies/artificial intelligence (IP5 NET/AI)
IP5 NET/AI roadmap
The leaders of the IP5 Offices endorsed the establishment of the IP5 NET/AI Task Force. The task force analyzes and compiles information about matters relating to new and emerging technologies (NET) and artificial intelligence (AI) that involve the IP5 offices. In January 2020, the task force conducted its first IP5 NET/AI meeting to explore NET/AI-related work at each of the IP5 offices and within each of the IP5 working groups. The task force identified several potential areas of cooperation. Following the inaugural meeting, the NET/AI Task Force drafted a scoping document that defined a strategic plan and identified the breadth of IP5 cooperation. This resulted in the development of the IP5 NET/AI Roadmap, which identifies four key areas of engagement:
- Statistics
- Classification
- IT aspects/utilization of NET/AI
- Legal
Patent Harmonization Expert Panel (PHEP)
In 2012, the IP5 established the IP5 Patent Harmonization Expert Panel (PHEP)—which concentrates on procedural harmonization topics to explore ways to potentially align certain patent practices among the five offices.
The IP5 Offices have been working collaboratively on two key PHEP projects. The first is the adoption of a global assignment. The second key PHEP project is the harmonization of allowable features in drawings. This project aims to identify common allowable features in drawings required to file patent applications among the IP5 Offices.
For additional information on IP5 Cooperation and IP5 achievements, visit the IP5 website.