Here is interesting news about patent activities in Australia and Taiwan. I find Taiwan to be an interesting aspect of patenting and global intellectual property rights. Because of China's continual veto, Taiwan can't get into the UN, and therefore join global bodies like the World Intellectual Property Organization (as opposed to India, who can join but doesn't want to). Thus patenting and IP protection is more difficult and costly when dealing with Taiwan, which given Taiwan's economic size, is one international headache we all really don't need. Mark Horsburgh, a subscriber in Australia, sent me the following item of how Australia and Taiwan signed a patent priority agreement between their two countries. I suspect more of this will happen in the future, though it would be more rational just to let Taiwan into the PCT. ==================== You might be interested in some news from the antipodes. Earlier this year Australia signed a bilateral agreement with Taiwan to recognise priority claims for patent and trade mark filings. Within the last fortnight Taiwan has made the necessary amendments to their law to implement the agreement (Australia made the changes months ago). I'm pretty sure that Australia is the only country that recognises Taiwan patents as a priority document and I'm sure that Australian patents are the only priority document recognised by Taiwan. In other news, Australia is changing to a 20 year patent term from application date and the trade mark term is changing to ten years and renewable every ten years (currently 7 years plus 14 years). ==================== Does anyone know if I as a US entity claim priority rights in Australia through a PCT application and then by filing in Australia, if this agreement extends my priority rights into Taiwan? India has a similar agreement with the United Kingdom and Canada, which opens up a similar indirect priority scheme for US applicants. ==================== Regarding the question at the end of the newspost on Taiwan : You can not extend your priority rights to Taiwan. Article 24 of the amended Taiwanese Patent Law says in part, "If the applicant is a foreign national, he may claim for priority only if his home country admits the priority of ROC nationals." You could probably have an Australian national make the application and then assign the patent after grant.This approach would require the Australian national to make the basic application but does not mean that the Australian national is the inventor, only that they derive title from the inventor. The string of assignments might be a bit long but you would end up with the earlier filing date in Taiwan. Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service (for subscription info, send 'help' to patents@world.std.com ) (for prior art search services info, send 'prior' to patents@world.std.com ) (for WWW patent searching, try http://sunsite.unc.edu/patents/intropat.html )