Patent Landscape Report on Ritonavir - WIPO

Figures 11a and 11b show the geographic distribution of extensions of an application toother jurisdictions, i.e. for each office of second filing (OSF) included in this bar chart, the barindicates the share of families having at least one family member filed with the respectiveOSF (in relation to the total of 805 patent families). There were a total of 5,257 instances ofsecond priority claims. Figure 11a shows that WIPO is chosen as the most often OSF byapplicants to file subsequent members of the same family. This is not surprising given thatWIPO is the authority in which applicants pursue the PCT route. Australia, Canada, theEuropean <strong>Patent</strong> Office and Japan are also chosen in approximately 50-60% of the familiesas an OSF. China is the next most often choice as an OSF. This information is useful togain an understanding about which countries are receiving the most patenting activity. Figure12 on the next page shows the total instances of second priority. In relation to both Figures11 and 12, only the first publication of each OSF was counted. Subsequent publicationsbelonging to the same family were ignored for the purposes of counting the times eachauthority appeared per family.When interpreting the data, it should be taken into account that there is a certain overlap betweencounts for a regional office as OSF and the counts of its member offices. For example,some of the counts for Germany (DE) as OSF are related to publications that are derivedfrom applications filed with the EPO (e.g. such with kind code T2). On the other hand,there may be applications that have been filed directly with DE as OSF and not at all with theEPO. Such applications would have to be added to the number of applications filed with theEPO in order to determine the true number of applications with a foreign priority that seekpatent protection in Germany. However, the statistics of OSF in Figure 11 of the present reporthas not undertaken to discriminate further between family members attributable to aparticular country as such and the regional office to which it adheres.