In the Patent Examination Quality Advisory Committee held on 12 May 2021, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) published statistics on administrative remedies for patent cases, including revocations of administrative decisions. These are summarised below.
Year | Lodged administrative lawsuits | Closed administrative lawsuits | Revoked cases | Revocation rate | |||
Completely revoked | Partially revoked | Subtotal | |||||
2016 | 104 | 107 | 14 | 12 | 26 | 24.30% | |
2017 | 103 | 98 | 15 | 11 | 26 | 26.53% | |
2018 | 103 | 112 | 18 | 8 | 26 | 23.21% | |
2019 | 95 | 107 | 22 | 3 | 25 | 23.36% | |
2020 | 67 | 76 | 13 | 7 | 20 | 26.32% | |
As shown above, the number of administrative lawsuits filed with the IP Court reduced to 67 cases in 2020 but the revocation rate remained around 26.32%. However, in the same year, the revocation rate for administrative appeals handled by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (the supervisory government agency of the IPO) was only 2.38%.
For further information on this topic please contact Hsiu-Ru Chien or Elina Yu at Lee and Li Attorneys at Law by telephone (+886 2 2763 8000) or email ([email protected] or [email protected]). The Lee and Li Attorneys at Law website can be accessed at www.leeandli.com.