Standard Inspection Office and Intellectual Property Office were formally founded on 1/26/1999, which are going to be "powerful server" in international competition.

Date:    1/25/99

Source: Library Times 1999-01-24/1998-10-16

 

　The Legislative Yuan passed on 10/15/1998 the organic rule of the Intellectual Property Office, Ministry of Economic Affairs (M.O.E.A.) through its final reading, which will serve as the legal source after the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) is re-organized into the Intellectual Property Office governing patent rights, exclusive rights of trademark, copyright, integrated circuit layouts and trade secrets. The business in respect of standards and weights & measurements originally handled by the NBS will be incorporated into the Bureau of Commodity Inspection & Quarantine which will be re-organized into the Standard Inspection Office. The Copyright Committee of the Ministry of Interior will be dissolved after incorporating its business into the Intellectual Property Office.

 

Intellectual property rights in Taiwan used to be governed by the NBS, Copyright Committee, Anti-Counterfeit Committee and the Commerce Department of the M.O.E.A.

 

On 1/26/1999, the Standard Inspection Office and the Intellectual Property Office were formally founded which unifies dispersed business and manpower, so as to create a more comprehensive system to govern standard inspection and intellectual property.

 

After re-organization, the Standard Inspection Office covers seven departments and six administration Sections. The seven departments are: the department of standards, the department of agricultural and animal industries & chemistry engineering inspection and administration, the department of mechanics & electrical engineering inspection and administration, the department of weights & measures administration, the department of overall planning, the department of inspection and the department of weights & measures examination.

 

Similarly, the Intellectual Property Office covers seven departments and six administration Sections. The seven departments are: the department of overall planning, 1st patent department, 2nd Patent department, 3rd patent department, the trademark department, the copyright department and information department.

 

Director-General of the Intellectual Property Office, Chen Ming-bang, has set three major goals for the re-organized Intellectual Property Office, which are "Internationalized Intellectual Property, Electronic Service, and the Professional Examination System.”

 

In order to speed up the examination procedure of patent & trademark applications and upgrade service quality, the Intellectual Property Office will continue to promote its automatic service system and is scheduled to utilize certain electronic services in the near future, which are:

(1) an automatic system governing official fees for patent & trademark applications;

(2) a database of drawing boards of 140,000 new design applications

(3) a two dimension bar-code system for patent applications

(4) designing an electronic patent gazette with browse and index functions

(5) re-organizing the database of foreign & domestic patents; creating an index service system

(6) creating an international information service by means of a homepage in English

 

According to the M.O.E.A., once the Intellectual Property Office is founded, the patent and trademark examination originally conducted by the NBS will be handed over to the newly designated examiners gradually. The patent examiners and researching staff, who were employed under contract and who were previously recruited to the NBS for coping with the increasing workload will be reduced year by year.