Meeting PCT/MIA 2018 held at the SPTO

For the Treaty improvement and updating

As every year, these dates are chosen to gather representatives from the WIPO and from the 23 International Searching Authorities under the PCT (ISA) at the MIA (Meeting of International Authorities), with the aim of discussing the main current aspects of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

The PCT is an international treaty which allows the protection proceedings for an invention to be started in one single international patent request. A selected group of International Patent Offices, known as ISAs, plays a vital role on the Treaty application. Their mission is to deal with international requests searching and examining for the 152 Contracting States by valuing the patentability of reclaimed inventions. A series of highly demanding requirements has to be met to join this office club; furthermore, it is essential to have enough technical staff available for the patent requests searching and examining. The SPTO has been ISA since 1995, as a result it handles the international requests whose official language is Spanish. To make these proceedings easier for everyone, the SPTO has recently decided to also allow using English as working and posting language when acting as ISA and IPEA.

Among the topics discussed during the meeting, the following ones stood out:

• Initiatives and programmes focused on improving the quality of international searching reports.
• Debate for the harmonization in the case of lack of invention unity.
• PCT online services, with increasing relevance due to their speed and effectiveness.
• Interaction between WIPO-CASE and Global Dossier applications, that allows Offices to access documentation databases.
• PCT system future developing roadmap.
• Creation of a system to protect PCT income (against variations in currency exchange) and evaluation of the first results of a pilot project between two offices.
• Monitoring of the various open lines to modify the PCT Regulations and the Guidelines for the ISA activity.
• Monitoring of the Working Group for the PCT Minimum documentation revision.
• Cooperation on searching and examining between different ISAs.

The MIA 2018 official opening counted on the presence of the Subsecretary of the Ministry of Energy, Tourism and the Digital Agenda, the Manager of the SPTO and the Deputy General Manager of the PCT Patents and Technology Sector of the WIPO.