The Patent Cooperation Treaty is the most important international treaty in the field of patents after the Paris Convention and is another milestone in the history of the development of the international patent system. The Patent Cooperation Treaty is an international cooperation treaty in the field of patents. It is an international cooperation treaty formulated by patent application countries to avoid duplication of work by patent offices of various countries. According to the proposal made by the United States in 1966, the World Intellectual Property Organization discussed with France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, the six countries with the most patent applications, and signed the Patent Cooperation Treaty in Washington, the United States on June 19, 1970. It came into effect on January 24, 1978 and was implemented on June 1, 1978. It is under the jurisdiction of the World Intellectual Property Organization headquartered in Geneva. It was amended in 1979 and 1984.
In November 1993, the Patent Office of my country promulgated the “Regulations on the Implementation of the Patent Cooperation Treaty in China” and implemented the regulations on January 1, 1994, becoming one of the contracting parties to the treaty. The treaty stipulates that as long as the patent applicant submits a patent application to the patent office of a country and indicates the name of the country for which protection is sought, the International Bureau of the World Intellectual Property Organization can uniformly handle the application, search, publication and preliminary examination, and forward the search report and preliminary examination report to the patent office of the designated country for protection, and the designated country will conduct a final examination in accordance with the provisions of its own patent law to decide whether to grant the patent right. The Patent Cooperation Treaty greatly simplifies the procedures for applying for patents in multiple countries for an invention, but it has not established an internationally unified patent system.
Since the adoption of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, it has been considered the most meaningful sign of progress in international cooperation in this field. However, it is a treaty that mainly deals with the cooperation and rationality of the submission, search and examination of patent applications and the dissemination of technical information contained therein. The Patent Cooperation Treaty does not “grant international patents”: the task and responsibility of granting patents can only be mastered by the patent offices of each country seeking patent protection or the institutions exercising their powers (designated offices). The Patent Cooperation Treaty does not compete with the Paris Convention, but is in fact a supplement to it. In essence, it is a special agreement under the Paris Convention that is open only to the member states of the Paris Convention.