Important Update: New Rules for the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) in Brazil

The Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BPTO) has announced modifications to the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) Program by means of Ordinance 48/2024, published in Official Gazette 2814 of December 10, 2024. On December 24, the criteria for receiving PPH requests were updated through Ordinance 26/2024 published in Official Gazette 2816.

The new rules significantly broaden the possibilities of expediting examination in Brazil via PPH route, in particular:

1. The annual limit of 3200 requests accepted will be equally divided into the quarters of 2025, i.e., the limit will be of 800 requests per quarter.
2. The previous limit of a single PPH request per week per applicant will be withdrawn;
3. The pending Brazilian claims should be conformed to those allowed in a corresponding application already examined by a partner patent office. Claims object of a positive PCT IPRP issued by a partner patent office may also be used;
4. The BPTO will now accept PPH requests for applications claiming priority from any country or region.

Furthermore, as of January 2025, Brazil will be part of the Global PPH initiative, which extends the PPH partnership to 27 Patent Offices, such as Germany, Japan, Finland, Australia, United Kingdom, and USA. In addition, currently the BPTO has individual partnership with EPO, France and China.

In 2024, the average examination time for the PPH program was 6 months from the request date, and the allowance rate was 95.94%. The technical fields with the highest number of requests were Digital Communication, Audiovisual Technology, Biotechnology and Technology Applied to Medicine, respectively.

New PPH requests will be accepted by the BPTO from January 1, 2025, when the new Ordinance 48/2024 starts to be in force.

PPH requests for applications with main IPC H04 (telecommunication cases) will not be accepted for the first quarter of 2025. The BPTO will review this decision for each quarter.

Since the weekly limit will be removed, we anticipate that the case-limit for 2025 shall be reached considerably fast, and, for this reason, we strongly recommend our clients to start evaluating cases that would benefit from the PPH program in 2025. We are already evaluating eligible cases and informing clients, but please let us know if you would like us to evaluate a specific case or portfolio.

For further information, please do not hesitate to contact our team at mail@kasznarleonardos.com.