The Visegrad Patent Institute has been appointed as an international authority under the PCT

In the frameworks of the 55th series of the meetings of the Assemblies of the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Visegrad Patent Institute (VPI) has been appointed as an international authority under the PCT, upon the decision of the Assembly of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) Union.

Pooling the existing capacities of the four Visegrad countries there will be a more favourable opportunity for the individual inventors and businesses of the region to make use of the PCT system covering 148 countries in the world. This also provides the possibility for the applicants of the participating countries to file their international patent applications in their native tongues, and to get answers to their questions arisen during the procedure also in their native tongues. The “Visegrad” search and examination reports concerning patentability will be more cost-effective (by the fee reductions available) in the field of international rights acquisition.

The institute to be established can also be part of the worldwide initiative (with the current participation of 19 patent authorities), which makes possible for the inventors of the Central-European region to receive international patent protection for their solutions in a fast and effective way in the countries participating in the cooperation.

After our opening statement on the VPI, support was expressed by the delegation of Romania on behalf of the group of the Central-European and Baltic States (CEBS), the delegation of Austria, the delegation of Iceland on behalf of the Nordic Patent Institute (NPI), in addition by the delegations of Japan, the Ukraine, Chile, China, Singapore, Russia, Montenegro, the USA, Finland, Spain, Greece, Australia, Uganda, the Republic of Korea and Ghana.

07 October 2015