ARIPO introduced some amendments to the Harare Protocol, which came into effect on January 1, 2020.
It has however come to the Office’s attention that some parties are not interpreting the change on the Fees Schedule about the Request for Substantive Examination fee” correctly.
Please note that the fee concerning substantive examination was previously composed of “Examination Report fee and Search Report fee” at US$300.00 each. In many cases users interpreted this to mean they could pay any one of the two fees and leave the other and to avoid this it was decided to combine the two and refer to it as “Request for Substantive Examination”.
A new fee “Prior Art Search Fee” was introduced to cater for instances where clients request, for their own use, prior art search (state of the art search). This fee is not in any way linked to the patent examination process.