The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (“TIPO”) has extended its pilot program for Accelerated Examination of Invention Patent Reexamination (AEPRe) for another year, effective September 1, 2026. The program provides an expedited pathway for eligible applications in which the examiner's first-instance decision rejects only some of the pending claims. Importantly, the applicant is not required to pay an additional official fee, and TIPO generally aims to issue the reexamination result within six months.
According to TIPO's statistics, 78 eligible AEPRe requests were filed during the past two years, with an average examination period of only 24.5 days, compared with approximately 10 to 13 months for ordinary reexamination proceedings. The substantial reduction in prosecution time has made AEPRe an attractive option for applicants and patent practitioners seeking early resolution of partially rejected applications.
Meanwhile, TIPO also published two examples of claim amendments that comply with the AEPRe requirements, along with a set of Q&As. Among these, Example 2 addresses a claim-amendment strategy that may, under ordinary Taiwan prosecution practice, raise a potential unity-of-invention issue and is therefore especially noteworthy.
In this example, an original independent claim 1, which includes feature A, and a dependent claim 2, which includes features A+B, are rejected over Reference 1 for lack of an inventive step. In contrast, dependent claims 3 and 4, which respectively include features A+C and A+B+D, are not rejected. TIPO indicates that the applicant may delete original claims 1 and 2, rewrite original claims 3 and 4 as two separate independent claims, and add at least one dependent claim under each of the newly rewritten independent claims.
This amendment structure is noteworthy because, under ordinary Taiwan prosecution practice, the two amended independent claims would typically be viewed as lacking unity of invention, and the examiner could potentially require the applicant to pursue one of the claimed inventions in a divisional application or delete one of them. TIPO's clarification on this question is provided in the Q&As: where the amendment complies with the AEPRe requirements - including the amendment illustrated in Example 2 - TIPO will, in principle, not address the unity issue during the AEPRe examination.
Needless to say, this is good news for patent applicants. While an accelerated examination procedure is designed to streamline examination and minimize the additional burden imposed on the examiner, TIPO expressly permits this type of amendment under AEPRe, even though adding dependent claims may introduce new combinations of claim limitations that require additional substantive examination.
In practical terms, the AEPRe framework appears to encourage applicants to pursue a layered claim strategy. An applicant may promptly narrow the claims toward subject matter that has already passed the patentability bars, while at the same time adding dependent claims that provide additional fallback positions. Such a strategy may enhance the resulting patent and preserve greater flexibility for future post-grant proceedings, including claim amendment in an invalidation proceeding.
The strategy may also be particularly useful where the commercial landscape has evolved between the first-instance examination and reexamination. To the extent that the original specification provides adequate support, an applicant may consider incorporating technical features observed in commercially relevant competing products into newly added dependent claims. If such claims ultimately issue, the resulting claim scope may provide a more straightforward basis for asserting literal infringement, potentially reducing reliance on the doctrine of equivalents and the evidentiary burden associated with proving equivalency.
Overall, the extended AEPRe pilot program offers more than simply an expedited examination timetable. By permitting certain claim amendments that strengthen the applicant's fallback positions without imposing an additional official fee, the program may allow applicants to use reexamination as an opportunity to improve both prosecution efficiency and the defensive value of the resulting patent.