TIPO Finalizes Draft Amendments to Taiwan’s Patent Law The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office recently submitted the draft Patent Law Amendment to the Executive Yuan and is expected to be passed soon.  Some of the key aspects of the amendment are as follows: A Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) will be established.  This new agency will deal with appeals of TIPO’s rejections of patent applications, patent term extension requests and procedural requests.  Also, post-grant amendments, compulsory license requests and invalidation actions will be handled by the board whose official name will be The Patent Committee for Review and Dispute Resolution.  The PTAB will be composed of senior patent examiners and legal experts, and a panel of 3 or 5 members will be formed to hear each case. The administrative appeal system will be adjusted.  The Petitions and Appeals Committee will be replaced by the PTAB, and the PTAB will replace the existing re-examination mechanism within the TIPO, thus becoming the first tribunal to hear an invalidation action.  For invalidation actions, the PTAB will examine invalidation actions on the basis of the adversary system by holding oral hearings. The time limit for filing divisional applications will be changed.  The time limit in future will be before issuance of the PTAB decision on an application or within 3 months from the date of receipt of a Notice of Allowance issued to an application.  These rules will also apply to design and utility model applications too. The grace period of 6 months after the disclosure of a design application and before filing will be extended to 12 months. In a dispute over...