On June 10, the State Duma had adopted, on first reading, amendments to the Russian Federation Civil Code, that aim at involving accredited institutions to carry out an information search and preliminary report on patentability as part of the application examination for inventions and utility models.

This initiative will reduce the amount of preliminary work undertaken by Rospatent’s experts and will enable them to focus on the most important applications, free up time for them, and accordingly, the overall quality of patents will increase, – noted Oksana Tarasenko, Deputy Minister of Economic Development.

Under the bill, the accreditation procedure of Russian scientific and educational institutions will be free of charge. At the same time, they should possess proven competencies in specific areas of expertise. Preliminary information search will be provided to the applicants on a voluntary basis.

The passage of the bill will be crucial to reducing the time spent by our experts on preliminary examination, enabling them to better understand the essence of the claimed invention and expand the pool of specialists conducting information search and patentability assessment related to specialized fields of science and technology. This will improve the patent application quality, reduce examination time and fees charged for substantive examination, – said Grigory Ivliev, Rospatent’s Head.

Under the Civil Code provisions, the applied procedure is still in force and will be carried out by Rospatent, which will take into account the results of the proposed preliminary procedures.