Singapore Intellectual Property Blog

I’m very pleased to have been invited to be a speaker at the BioPharma Asia Convention 2016.

We’ve recently heard from the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore that it plans to close off the foreign route for Singapore patent applications and to abolish supplementary examination.

Under the proposals, it will no longer be possible to request supplementary examination to rely on the grant of a foreign corresponding application for Singapore applications filed on or after 1 January 2017 .

Only applications that have been examined for novelty and non-obviousness under Singapore patent law will be allowed to grant as patents in Singapore.

Patents Form 8 is the “Statement of Inventorship and of Right to Grant of Patent (PF8)”.

The current version of the form requires the following information on each inventor to be provided to IPOS:

Under the Patents Act, there is an obligation for an Applicant to name the inventors in a Singapore patent application. The Applicant is also required to disclose how he derived the right to be granted a patent from the inventors.

The time limits for filing a statement of inventorship are set out in the Rules, but are different depending on the type of application involved. Failure to file a statement of inventorship could lead to the application being treated as having been abandoned.

Because of this, it is crucial that a statement of inventorship is filed at IPOS within the relevant time limt.

Since yesterday’s post on the topic of inventorship in Singapore, we have been made aware of some potentially misleading information on the Internet:

This passage appears to indicate that a Statement of Inventorship is not required to be filed, unless IPOS calls for it.

If so, this statement couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, if you don’t file a Statement of Inventorship in time and wait for IPOS to ask you to file it, you might end up with a patent application that is treated as having been abandoned!