How to Search the Taiwanese Patent Office Website

Let’s explore the Taiwanese patent office website to see what information is available. While I said the Taiwanese patent office website is easy to navigate, I have two caveats for that.  The first caveat is getting to the search screen itself.  To access search, you hover over the Patent Search link at the top right corner of the screen. 

You have several search options, but I prefer the Quick Search.  Over the years though, I’ve learned that when selecting any search option, the web page refreshes to the exact web page you were just at which is quite frustrating.  However, if you repeat the process again by selecting Quick Search (or any search you’ve chosen) you will get to the search screen the second time.

The second caveat is the Taiwan patent number format.  The patent number format is tnnnnnn where ‘t’ is the type of patent right and ‘n’ is the six-digit serial number.  Now that format, on its face, doesn’t seem tricky. 

The trick comes with the types of patent rights.  Designs start with a capital ‘D’, utility models start with a capital ‘M’ and lastly invention patents start with a capital ‘I’.  That’s not the number 1 or a lower case ‘l’.  Therefore, if you have Taiwan case with 7 characters and the first one is a number, your application number, more than likely, has an error. 

There are several other Taiwan patent and application number tips on the European Patent Office website entitled Numbering System-Chinese Taipei (TW).

Alright now that the caveats have been addressed, let’s continue our Taiwan patent searching.  The Quick Search screen allows you to select, in the dark purple section, what patent type the search tool should search.  I typically leave all types selected but you could narrow this down.  I also tend to enter the patent/publication number, but the drop down does allow for certification and application number fields as well.  Once the text is entered and you click search, a record should display.

The record lists the basic bibliographic data of patent/publication number, title, issued/publication date, application date, application number, IPC code, inventor, applicant, priority number, and abstract. This is all basic, yet important, information for file opening, data verification or renewals purposes.

I greatly appreciate having all this information right at the top. Nevertheless, the information I treasure the most is the Patent Right Change section. This section tells you whether it has been licensed, opposed, or invalidated. My favorite fields are date of lapse and/or due date of annual fee along with years of annuities paid. I always like it when a website is direct and produces when an annuity was paid and the year if possible. This provides visible proof the patent office has processed the payment.

The last treasure I like about this website is access to the granted full text.  Towards the top of the screen, you will see a few book icons.  In this example, there are three book icons that say Patent Gazette, Patent Specifications and Granted Full Text, respectively.  If you click on the Granted Full Text and enter a check code, images of the granted patent will display in a pop up browser.  However, at first glance, it appears that you cannot download this patent information.  A trick that I’ve learned is you can opt to print these browser pages.  When the print dialog box appears, if you have Adobe Reader, you may have the option to print to Adobe Reader.  This will effectively save the browser pages into a pdf which overall acts like a download.

Now you have a few hidden treasures on the Taiwanese patent office website!  I’m sure there are more so if you know of one I didn’t mention, please let us know or post on our LinkedIn page.  If you found this valuable, we have another post that focuses on the Best Practices for Efficient Docketing of Routine Formalities in Taiwan, as well as Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico, India, and Russia/Eurasia.  Black Hills IP hopes this content becomes a continuous flow of information that the IP community can rely and act on.  We are the leaders in smarter IP data docketing.