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Intellectual Property Department (HK/IPD) — national
Layer national
Jurisdiction HK (WIPO ST.3: HK) — Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China
Issuing body Intellectual Property Department (IPD), Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
Rights administered standard patent (original-grant route, "OGP"), standard patent (re-registration route from a designated patent in CN / GB / EP(UK)), short-term patent (8-year), trademark, registered design, copyright (administrative registration limited; no register), plant variety (separate agency), geographical indication (TM-based protection)
Working languages English and Traditional Chinese (both official under the Basic Law); IPD pages are bilingual mirrors
Connector status fees: ready to build (green — IPD pages reachable, full schedule rendered as native HTML tables); register: not yet surveyed
Last verified 2026-05-19
Manifest entry not yet listed (fees scheduled for next build wave)

Higher layers covering this office transitively:

  • EPO INPADOC / OPS — HK is a recognized patent office in INPADOC; HK patents (granted via either route) flow through OPS biblio + family + legal events.
  • WIPO Patentscope — Hong Kong is not a PCT contracting state; coverage for PCT entries into HK flows through the re-registration route via CN (PCT designations into China that are extended to HK) or GB / EP(UK) (PCT entries into those offices that are then re-registered in HK). Direct PCT-HK national-phase is not available.
  • WIPO Madrid Monitor — HK is part of the Madrid Protocol via PRC's territorial extension; Madrid IRs designating "CN-HK" flow through Madrid Monitor as a CN-territory designation, not as a standalone HK designation.
  • WIPO Hague Express — HK is part of the Hague System via PRC's accession effective 2022-05-05 extended to HK; Hague IRs designating CN cover HK by territorial application.

§1 Mission

The Intellectual Property Department is the sole authority for registration and administration of industrial property rights in the Hong Kong SAR. It operates under the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau and is the registrar for standard patents (via two distinct routes), short-term patents, trade marks, and registered designs. Substantive law is contained in three principal ordinances with their respective subsidiary rules:

  • Patents Ordinance (Cap. 514) + Patents (General) Rules (Cap. 514C)
  • Trade Marks Ordinance (Cap. 559) + Trade Marks Rules (Cap. 559A)
  • Registered Designs Ordinance (Cap. 522) + Registered Designs Rules (Cap. 522A)

All four are accessible via Hong Kong e-Legislation, the bilingual statutory database maintained by the Department of Justice.

The dual-route patent system is the structural feature most relevant to fee work: since December 2019 the OGP (original- grant route) has run in parallel with the older re-registration route. Foreign filers who already hold a designated patent in CN, GB, or EP(UK) typically choose re-registration; HK-only filers and those without a foreign anchor patent use the OGP route. The two routes have substantially different fee schedules — see §4 for the structural details.

§2 What's unique here

Data types that live ONLY at IPD and are not covered transitively through CN at full fidelity:

  • HK standard patents (original-grant route, OGP) — direct HK national filings, available since December 2019 under the Patents (Amendment) Ordinance 2016. INPADOC has these but legal-events fidelity is thinner than for CN/EPO-anchored patents.
  • HK short-term patents — sui generis 8-year term, granted on formality examination only, without substantive examination. Useful for fast-moving or short-lived inventions; statutorily separate from standard patents.
  • HK standard patents (re-registration route) — derived from designated CN / GB / EP(UK) patents but maintained under HK law; the post-registration prosecution events (annuity payments, surrender, restoration) are HK-only.
  • HK national-only trade marks — direct filings (not via Madrid). Madrid designations targeting HK are encoded as CN-territory designations through PRC's Madrid extension, not as standalone HK marks.
  • HK national-only registered designs — Locarno-classed national designs under Cap. 522, separate from Hague IRs designating CN-extended-to-HK.

§3 Programmatic surfaces — to be surveyed

Status: deferred. Fees connector takes priority. A follow-up survey should cover:

  • IPD's "Online Search System" — public register search for patents, TMs, and designs; surface (HTML, JSON BFF, or both) to be characterized.
  • "Patent (Amendment) Ordinance 2016 Implementation" bibliographic data feed if any.
  • e-Legislation as a substantive-law citation source (XML/JSON not exposed; HTML is fully JS-rendered).
  • Bulk gazette feeds (Hong Kong Government Gazette) for IP matters.

§4 Fees

Status (2026-05-19): Ready to build. The fee schedules are published on three IPD pages as native HTML tables with clean column structure, fully rendered server-side. The statutory primary source (Cap. 514C Schedule 4, Cap. 559A Schedule 1, Cap. 522A schedule) is on e-Legislation but is JS- rendered and not directly extractable without dev-browser — it serves as the formal citation target, not the extraction target.

Publication chain:

  1. Primary statutory source — Hong Kong e-Legislation (https://www.elegislation.gov.hk):
  2. Patents (General) Rules (Cap. 514C), Schedule 4 — elegislation.gov.hk/hk/cap514C. Promulgated under Patents Ordinance Cap. 514.
  3. Trade Marks Rules (Cap. 559A), Schedule 1 — elegislation.gov.hk/hk/cap559A. Promulgated under Trade Marks Ordinance Cap. 559.
  4. Registered Designs Rules (Cap. 522A) — elegislation.gov.hk/hk/cap522A. Promulgated under Registered Designs Ordinance Cap. 522.

Each is the legally binding text; amendments are made by subsidiary-legislation orders gazetted in the Hong Kong Government Gazette. e-Legislation pages are SPA-rendered (server returns a 7.5 KB JS shell that resolves the ordinance text via authenticated JSP backends) — not directly fetchable as HTML without a JS-capable client.

  1. IPD forms-and-fees pages (practical extraction target, reachable as native HTML):
  2. Patents: ipd.gov.hk/en/patents/forms-and-fees/index.html — 32 tables observed 2026-05-19. Two-column shape (Descriptions | Fee (HKD)) with sub-row e-filing / paper-filing splits where applicable; route is encoded inline in the description (e.g., "Request for grant of a standard patent (O)" for OGP route, (R) for re-registration). Short-term-patent rows are tagged inline.
  3. Trade Marks: ipd.gov.hk/en/trade-marks/forms-and-fees/index.html — 17 tables observed.

  4. Registered Designs: ipd.gov.hk/en/designs/forms-and-fees/index.html — 12 tables observed. URL note: the IPD designs section lives at /en/designs/, not /en/registered-designs/ (the latter 404s). All other IPD sections use the long form; designs is the singleton exception.

  5. Bilingual mirrors: the Chinese-language versions live at /tc/... (Traditional Chinese) on the same paths. English is the most stable parser target.

Earlier "URL drift / unknown" finding superseded. The 2026-05-19 probe found all three pages reachable from US egress with no auth, no CDN challenge, and clean table markup. The URL for designs was simply different from the guess.

Scope of the schedule (HKD-denominated):

  • Standard patents — OGP route ((O) rows). Filing request for grant, advertisement, late-payment surcharge, request for substantive examination (~HK$4,000), grant fee (~HK$4,413), annuity (3rd through 20th year), recordation, amendment, divisional, restoration.
  • Standard patents — re-registration route ((R) rows). Request to record (designated patent application from CN / GB / EP(UK)), advertisement, request for registration and grant (~HK$686 — substantially lower than the OGP grant fee because most prosecution has already been done by the designated office), annuity, recordation.
  • Short-term patents. Filing, search report by designated searching authority, grant, renewal (4th year and 8th year — short-term patents have a maximum 8-year term), recordation. Separate fee track from standard patents.
  • Trade marks. Application per class (Form T2, HK$2,000 for the first class with reduced additional-class fees), divisional application, opposition, observation, cancellation / revocation / invalidation, registrar's decision review, renewal (10-year term, renewable indefinitely), recordation.
  • Registered designs. Application by design / by set / multiple-design applications (1, 2, or more designs for articles in the same class), with e-filing vs paper-filing splits. Renewal (5-year terms, renewable up to 25 years). Recordation.

Column model:

The IPD fee tables use a Descriptions | Fee (HKD) shape, with inline route tagging in the description column: - (O) → original-grant route for standard patents - (R) → re-registration route for standard patents - (no tag) on patent rows → short-term patent or general

Where electronic filing is discounted relative to paper, a sub-table breaks the fee column into E-filing | Paper-filing (e.g., the request-for-grant row: HK$345 e-filing vs HK$480 paper). The connector should preserve both columns as separate FeeItems with filing_channel = "electronic" / "paper" provenance.

Patent-route fee divergence — practical impact for client work. The same legal step has very different fees on the two patent routes. From the IPD patent page (current): - Grant of a standard patent (OGP, (O)): HK$4,413 - Registration and grant of a standard patent ((R)): HK$686

The connector must emit both as distinct FeeItems with route tags; client-facing summary tools should ask which route is in scope before quoting.

Discount tiers (mapped to EntityTier):

  • No US-style small-entity reduction. HK schedules do not encode size-based tiers.
  • The OGP route's substantive-examination fee (~HK$4,000) is itself effectively the size-neutral examination cost.
  • Reduced rates appear at the form level via the e-filing / paper-filing split — encoded as filing_channel provenance, not as a tier.

Annual revision cadence. Amendments are made by gazetted subsidiary-legislation orders. There is no fixed annual republication cadence; updates are sporadic and typically tied to legislative reform packages (the most recent being the 2019 Patents (Amendment) Ordinance implementation). Freshness window can be quarterly.

Statutory basis:

v1 connector plan — HK/IPD/Fees/{Patent, ShortTermPatent, Trademark, Design}:

  • Source: the three IPD HTML pages.
  • Parser pattern: lxml multi-table HTML — same shape as CIPO Canada and IP Australia. Per-page table walk, with inline (O) / (R) regex tagging on description, and e-filing / paper-filing sub-table flattening.
  • Currency: HKD.
  • Provenance metadata: version_as_of = "live" (no fixed publication date on the IPD pages; cite Cap. 514C / Cap. 559A / Cap. 522A as the statutory authority and record the fetch date as the version pin).
  • Freshness probe: quarterly hash check of the three IPD pages; on detected change, diff the fee values and surface in the change log.
  • Route handling: emit route = "OGP" / "re-registration" / "short-term" as a FeeItem tag for patent rows; emit filing_channel = "electronic" / "paper" where the sub-table split applies.
  • SSL note: Both ipd.gov.hk and elegislation.gov.hk present valid certs; no verify=False required.

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

Fees connector (this wave)

Ship HK/IPD/Fees/{Patent, ShortTermPatent, Trademark, Design} per §4 — four routes from three HTML pages. The IPD HTML route is the practical scraping target; the e-Legislation Cap. links are the citation source. Patent route tags ((O) / (R)) and filing-channel splits (e-filing / paper) are first-class FeeItem dimensions.

Register connector (deferred)

Survey pending. Open questions for the survey:

  • Does IPD publish a documented REST/JSON API for patent / TM / design search?
  • Is the Online Search System guest-accessible or account-gated?
  • Is there a bulk gazette feed for IP matters?
  • How does the re-registration route surface bibliographic data — under HK patent numbers, or as cross-references to the designated CN / GB / EP(UK) patents?

Until surveyed, HK register coverage flows transitively through EPO INPADOC (granted HK patents on either route), Madrid Monitor (Madrid IRs designating CN-HK), Hague Express (Hague IRs designating CN-extended-to-HK), and Google Patents (web-crawl basis).

§6 Known unknowns

  • e-Legislation extractable variant. The HTML pages resolve to a JS-rendered SPA; is there a publicly documented XML / JSON / PDF export route for an individual ordinance? Worth a quick reverse-engineer on the Cap. 514C page to find the data endpoint before committing to dev-browser as the only route.
  • Bilingual table parity. Whether the Traditional Chinese /tc/ mirror of the IPD fee pages stays byte-for-byte synchronized with the English /en/ version, or drifts. v1 parses EN only.
  • Route encoding completeness. Verified (O) and (R) patent route tags appear in the description column. Need to confirm whether every patent row is tagged or whether some are route-agnostic (e.g., common recordation fees).
  • Hague-CN-HK territorial scope. Whether IPD treats Hague IRs designating CN as automatically protected in HK, or whether a separate HK extension request is required. Doesn't affect fee work directly but matters for register-side coverage.
  • Short-term patent search-authority designation. The designated searching authority option list (CN, EP, JP, etc.) affects the search-report fee — verify whether the IPD table encodes per-authority pricing or a single rate.

§7 References

IPD institutional + fee pages (reachable):

Substantive law (Hong Kong e-Legislation — JS-rendered):

International framework:

Last updated 2026-05-19.