In March 2024, Parliament passed a partial revision of the Patents Act. The corresponding implementing provisions in the Patents Ordinance need to be amended before the revised act can come into effect. This has been taken as an opportunity to completely revise the outdated ordinance. The revised ordinance will thus be submitted for consultation.

The revised Patents Act passed by Parliament governs the new features in the Swiss patent system. The preliminary draft of the completely revised Patents Ordinance implements these legislative amendments and regulates the details of the new patent granting procedure, including a newly introduced optional full examination and a compulsory search with a report on the state of the art for each patent application. It also introduces the options of using English-language technical documents and publishing the patent application in English.

 

The Patents Ordinance has been completely revised on this occasion. The currently applicable ordinance came into effect on 1 January 1978. Many of its provisions date back to the non-digital era. In particular in the international context of patent law, they do not deal with today’s need to submit, manage and store as many documents as possible electronically.

 

The amendments proposed in the preliminary draft will remove existing barriers to digitalisation and facilitate electronic communication with the IPI and electronic data management. At the same time, the draft lays the foundations for the IPI to take further digitalisation steps in future.

 

Additionally, some of the provisions have been aligned with those of the European Patent Convention and the Trade Mark Protection Ordinance. This will result in numerous technical simplifications and improvements for applicants.

Finally, the patent granting procedure has been streamlined, and applicants will have new opportunities to speed up their applications.

 

The ordinance will be submitted for public consultation so that all interested parties are informed and have the opportunity to comment. The consultation period is expected to start at the beginning of April 2025 and to last some three months.

 

You can find further information on the revision of patent law on our website.