八卷一期　89年01月16日

Patent and trademark examiner qualification statutes approved
On 14 January 2000, the Legislative Yuan gave final approval to the Patent Examiner Qualification Statute and the Trademark Examiner Qualification Statute. These statutes govern the qualification, training, and promotion of patent and trademark examiners and provide a legal basis for the patent and trademark examination system. The passage of these two laws is intended to help raise the quality of patent and trademark examination in Taiwan.
Intellectual Property Office Director Chen Ming-Bang noted that both the Patent Law and the Trademark Law require that required qualifications of patent and trademark examiners be established by law. He said that because examination of patents and trademarks involves specialized knowledge, the codification of examiner qualifications is an important step toward strengthening the protection of intellectual property rights in Taiwan. He noted that only qualified professional examiners are capable of performing high-quality examinations and preventing disputes relating to examinations.
The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) handles close to 80,000 patent applications and 60,000 trademark applications each year. Because the pool of qualified examiners is extremely limited, their workloads are heavy. The shortage of personnel for patent examination is particularly acute, with difficulty supplying qualified personnel to match industries and areas of technology. Moreover, the recent rapid development of science and technology in Taiwan has made it even more difficult to recruit patent examiners.
To overcome the shortage and to facilitate the work of the IPO, the IPO has planned to recruit and select examiners through national examinations. The IPO has also proposed revising the Organic Law of the IPO by adding an Article 16-1 that would authorize the Executive Yuan to establish required qualifications for the hiring of patent and trademark examiners and the retention of examiners previously hired under prior IPO selection procedures. The intent is to attract patent and trademark examiners who possess valuable experience in order to avoid a gap during the transition to a system of recruitment based on national examinations. Article 16, however, provides that the number of hired examiners and may not exceed 20% of the number of trademark and patent examiners recruited through examination.

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