WIPO ASSEMBLY
October 1st, 2002
BY KEITH NUTHALLTHE GENERAL Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organisation has streamlined and simplified the international patent application filing system as operated under its Patent Cooperation Treaty. Delegates agreed to integrate two key processes, namely an international search looking for existing patents that might throw doubt on the uniqueness of an invention and an examination of the application itself, checking whether it is novel, involves an inventive step and can be exploited industrially. Until now, these mandatory tasks have been ...
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