Various provisions of the Industrial Property Act, No. 3 of 2001 (the Act) were amended through the Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act, No. 11 of 2017. The effective date of the amendments was 04th May 2017.
The amendments aimed at correcting typographical errors and deleting parts of the Act that were not implemented in practice. The significant amendments that shall have a bearing on IP Practice were those effected to Section 44 of the Act. Section 44 (2) was amended to increase the period for making the request for substantive examination from three (3) years to five (5) years. This amendment aims at addressing the problem faced by PCT applicants as the applications enter the national phase in the thirtieth month which is 2 ½ years from the international filing date. Such applicants only had about six (6) months to apply for substantive examination, which was a very short time considering that most of the PCT applications are by persons who are non-Kenyan residents. The increase in the period shall allow more applications to be examined fully as failure to abide by the three years period meant that most PCT applications were deemed abandoned.
There was also the addition of a new subsection 3(c) which allows for the examination of compliance with unity of invention during substantive examination rather than as a separate examination.
Lastly, subsection 7 was amended to allow for the Managing Director to invite an applicant to make observations, and where applicable to amend the application, where the Managing Director is of the opinion that all the requirements of patentability including unity of invention have not been fulfilled by the applicant.
The above-mentioned amendments were also notified to the general public by the Managing Director of the Kenya Industrial Property Institute, Mr. Sylvance Sange, through a practice note published in the Kenya Industrial Property Journal dated 30th June, 2017.
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