Taiwan IP Updates  ¡V July 2024

By Lyndon 

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Taiwan Revises Rules for Hearings on Patent Invalidation Cases

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office has introduced new “Guidelines for Hearings on Patent Invalidation Cases” in order to improve the quality of the hearing process.  Some of the most significant revisions are as follows:

1. More regulations have been added to the pre-hearing preparation stage. As well as the existing rules governing conducting the hearing and admissibility of documents and evidence, the amendment now adds regulations pertaining to organization and simplification of the disputed issues, clarifies the post-grant amendments of disputed patents, and specifies procedures for agreement on key points of defense and offense during the hearing process.
2. Besides being responsible for examining the patent invalidation case, the presiding officer for the hearing will now be allowed to share thoughts on factual, legal and evidential disputes in order to render the process more transparent.
3. Hearings can now be conducted via video conferencing, enabling participants to join from office or home.  This will also make it easier for international participants to join which is the common global trend.
4. In the case when a party is absent from the proceedings, the examiner will still be able to hold a “one-party hearing”.  However, the hearing should be rescheduled if the absent party did not receive proper notification of the hearing, or the attending party cannot provide necessary evidence for matters to be investigated by the examiner, or the matter presented by the attending party was not provided to the other party within a reasonable length of time.
5. The summary of the hearing shall be recorded and supplemented with audio or video recordings to simplify the content.

Computex Meeting in June Underlines Taiwan’s Importance in the Tech Ecosystem

Tainan-born CEO of U.S.-based Advanced Micro Devices, Lisa Su, reminded global tech leaders of how central Taiwan was to the development of computer technology historically, and also heading into the future with AI.  According to Ms. Su, artificial intelligence (AI) is the most important technology of the last 30 years.  Taiwanese supply chain partners like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) will continue to be crucial as a chip manufacturer that will be needed for AI applications in the fields of healthcare, automotive capability and scientific research.  Ms. Su mentioned TSMC’s research and development of CoWoS as a recent example of its strength in advanced computing and packaging.  CoWoS is a 3D packaging technology launched by TSMC that enables the integration of multiple dies and memory cubes into a single package.  It therefore can support the continuation of Moore’s Law by allowing more transistors to work together.  Moore’s law is the observation made by Gordon Moore that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles roughly every two years.  It is expected that Tainan will be hosting more tech businesses in the future – a natural byproduct of the uptick in tech patents produced in Taiwan.