Filing for patent protection in multiple jurisdictions – the US and Europe for example – currently means a completely separate process in each location, even though many of the documents involved are the same. This redundancy is expensive and time-consuming for inventors.

A new initiative from the “IP5” promises to improve matters.

The “IP5” are the world’s most important patent offices: in the US, Europe, China, Japan, and Korea. Together they account for 90% of all patents filed around the world.

The IP5’s “Global Dossier” is designed to make life easier for inventors (and their patent attorneys). According to the USPTO, “Global Dossier” is “a virtual environment to give all stakeholders secure, one-stop access and management to dossier and/or examination information of all family applications.”

The use of state-of-the-art technology will reduce the duplication of effort that goes into filing patents in more than location.

A blog post from David Kappos, the head of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) cites the following advantages:

The advantages we envision from Global Dossier include: facilitation of preplanned cross-filings; one-portal management of cross-filed applications; elimination of the need to file duplicate documents in multiple offices (e.g., priority documents, prior art citations, and so on); and cost savings through the use of modern machine translation tools.

The head of the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), Kim Ho-won, said:

Patent users may look forward to a double effect of increased convenience and decreased cost, and patent offices will see an enhancement in deliberation quality and efficiency as [they] will be able to refer to foreign patent deliberation information.

Although most of the individual features of the Global Dossier initiative aren’t new, it provides a framework for existing initiatives such as the facilitation of electronic filing.

Those interested in learning more about Global Dossier can watch a short video.

The USPTO also invites feedback.