National Intellectual Property Administration: Optimize examination standards and rules to address urgent issues in examination practices.

Today, reporters learned that the National Intellectual Property Administration announced a decision to amend the "Patent Examination Guidelines". It mentioned that, in response to the pressing issues in examination practices, the optimization of examination standards and rules will be carried out. Firstly, it will improve the same-day application processing method, only allowing the acquisition of invention patent authorization by abandoning utility model patent rights, in line with the legislative intent. Secondly, based on the legal connotation and essential requirements of the inventive clause, it will clarify that the lack of contribution to solving technical problems in the claims usually does not bring creativity to the technical solution, in order to improve examination efficiency and enhance the quality of patent applications. Thirdly, it will explicitly state that invalidity declaration requests that are not the true intentions of the applicant will not be accepted, regulating malicious invalidity behaviors.