India: Availability of WIPO Digital Access Service under the WIPO-India Cooperation Agreement

Source: www.wipo.int

Recently, a WIPO – INDIA Cooperation agreement was established between World Intellectual Property Organization (hereinafter referred to as the ‘WIPO’) and Indian Patent Office (hereinafter referred to as the ‘IPO’) on January 31, 2018, stating that the IPO has started the WIPO Digital Access Service (DAS) for priority documents submitted by the applicants from the participating Patent offices.

The WIPO Digital Access Service is an extremely helpful tool as it facilitates Easy, Secure, Quick and Inexpensive procedure for submission of certified copies of Priority documents. The IPO will act as a depositing office and will upload certified copies of patent and industrial design applications as priority documents, including International Patent applications under PCT filed at the Office (RO/IN) which are filed on and after January 31, 2018. The applicant(s) will have to specifically request the patent office to make such priority documents available to the WIPO DAS.

The features of WIPO DAS are as under:

• Applicant(s) can simply request the office of first filing to deposit the priority document into the WIPO DAS system, and request offices of second filing to use the service for obtaining access of such documents.
• Use of an access code provided by WIPO DAS to authorize access;
• Documents are exchanged via secure channels;
• The DAS Service is hosted and administered by WIPO.
• No need to provide a certified copy of a priority document separately to each office of second filing.
• No need to pay for multiple copies of paper priority documents.

The Agreement covers cooperative activities for the improvement of IP business services at the Office, including projects for digitalization, data capture and data quality improvement, data exchange for the dissemination of IP information, provision of business systems by WIPO for digitization, document management, online search and any related systems or modules and creation of national and/or regional lP databases. The procedure for depositing the priority document(s) by the applicant is an easy process consisting of 6 steps which has been clearly explained in the notification.

The notification regarding this agreement was published on March 12, 2018 which was issued by office of The Controller General Patents, Designer & Trade Marks.