Taiwan IP Updates  ¡V May 2024

By Lyndon 

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Taiwan Issues Report on Patent Trends for Semiconductor Industry Waste Management

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) recently issued a report titled Analysis of Patent Trends of Key Technologies for Waste Treatment in the Semiconductor Industry.  The document looked at patent applications related to waste treatment of copper, silica mud and hydrogen in the semiconductor industry.

1. Regarding applications related to copper recycling, the patent offices of the US, Japan, Europe, China and Korea ranked as the top five patent offices in terms of the number of patent applications and accounted for approximately 70% of patent applications in this field worldwide.  Looking at the data regionally, applicants from various Asian countries accounted for 62% of the worldwide total, but European, American and Australian applicants also filed a significant number of patent applications reflecting their long histories of large mining companies and their continued development of their technological level such as in the fields of pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, microbial metallurgy and other processing means.
2. Regarding applications related to silica mud recycling, the abovementioned five major patent offices plus TIPO accounted for 93% of patent applications in this field worldwide.  Regionally, applicants from Asian countries filed the majority of patent applications totaling 86.5% worldwide.  By contrast, Europe and American applicants only came to 7.2% worldwide, reflecting that Asian applicants had more initiative to develop technologies related to the various types of solid liquid separation such as filtration, centrifugation, flotation, fusion, vaporization, magnetic separation, gravity separation, hydrocyclone, electrostatic separation and vacuum microwave drying.
3. Regarding applications related to hydrogen recovery, except for the Korean office, the other four major ranked offices were the biggest source of applications in this field accounting for 76.4% of the worldwide total.  Regionally, applicants from various countries in the Asian region accounted for 59.2% of applications worldwide.  Due to the earlier development of hydrogen energy in these countries, European and American applicants had a significant share with 33.8% of patent applications worldwide, reflecting their strengths in gas purification such as membrane separation, pressure swing adsorption, cryogenic distillation, temperature swing adsorption, molecular sieve, solvent absorption as those techniques relate to hydrogen recovery.

Taiwan Updates the Trademark Classification for Goods and Services

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) has made adjustments to the designated goods and services names in trademark applications in response to the latest edition of the Nice Classification index.  A total of 422 items have been added and 56 items deleted.  An additional 15 modifications have been made to class and subclass names or annotations, as well as 25 corrections.  The list of designated goods and services categories and names have been updated on the online trademark filing system as well.

Taiwan Introduces New AI Search by Image Function

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) announced on March 25 that they had released a new AI Search by Image feature which allows the public to upload trademark images and swiftly verify whether identical or similar trademarks have already been registered or applied for.  The newly launched AI Search by Image feature allows users to obtain AI-pre-filtered approximate trademarks without entering any other information.  This enables faster comparison compared to previous cases, reducing the risk of confusion with other similar trademarks and increasing the chances of successful trademark registration.  The feature is still in the beta testing phase, and supplements the current image search system.  The public is advised that before the official version is launched, search results should still be based on the current Graphical Similarity Search with filters of Graphic Path, Goods or Services Name, or Group of Similar Goods or Services.  To improve the detection rate of graphical similarities, especially for trademarks combining text and graphics, users are advised to clearly mark the graphical area of the trademark before conducting a search.  Additionally, users can combine the current graphical path search method to ensure the comprehensive retrieval of potential trademarks that may constitute graphical similarities.