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Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO / 智慧財產局)
Layer national
Jurisdiction TW (Republic of China / Taiwan)
Issuing body Intellectual Property Office, Ministry of Economic Affairs (經濟部智慧財產局)
Rights administered patent, utility_model, design (one Patent Act), trademark, copyright (registry only — not an examined right since 1985)
Working languages Traditional Chinese (primary); partial English on policy pages and structured-field names; field content is Chinese-only
Connector status partial — only the Trade Secrets Act statute (TW/MOJ/TradeSecretsAct) ships today; the TIPO REST API is verified green but not yet wrapped
Last verified 2026-05-19 (fees routes added; legacy fee URLs corrected after drift)
Manifest entry coverage/sources.yaml → TW/MOJ/TradeSecretsAct (the only TW row in the manifest today)

Detail surveys:

Higher layers covering this office transitively:

  • None. Taiwan is not a WIPO member (PRC blocks ROC membership); therefore TW is not in PCT, Madrid, Hague, UPOV, or INPADOC. TIPO is the only route to TW IP data. The EPO INPADOC family bridge that covers CN/JP/KR does not extend to TW patents.
  • WIPO Lex carries TW statutes under the politically-charged "Taiwan Province of China" profile (wipo.int/wipolex/en/members/profile/TW) — that's the only WIPO-administered TW resource.

Rating: 🟢 Green

Swagger 2.0 REST API at cloud.tipo.gov.tw/S220/opdataapi/ verified live; Taiwan OGDL v1.0 (CC-BY-4.0 + explicit sublicensing); 15 GET ops; 1.45M patents + 3.39M trademarks Jump to access details → View on the atlas →

§1 Mission

TIPO is the unitary IP office for Taiwan, administering invention patents, utility models, designs (all under one Patent Act), trademarks, the integrated-circuit-layout registry, the copyright office (administrative only — no exam since 1985), and the Trade Secrets Act regulatory function. It is the sole authoritative source for TW IP data: because Taiwan is excluded from every WIPO treaty system, there is no PCT national-phase, no Madrid IR designating TW, no Hague Geneva-Act design designating TW, and no INPADOC family bridge that reaches the TW register. For agents covering Asia, the TIPO surface is a load-bearing piece that cannot be substituted by any higher-layer source.

§2 What's unique here

Data points reachable only through TIPO (no upstream substitute):

  • TW invention/UM/design biblio + IPC/LOC + applicant nationality (/PatentAppl). Filing data back to 1972 (oldest in the API is appl-no=06202104, appl-date=1972/07/26, verified live).
  • TW trademark register (3,386,403 applications back to 1951; appl-no=000000001, appl-date=1951/02/27, applicant "盛香堂　許鉗", Taichung).
  • Patent-rights status events including the Taiwan-specific twins-flag field — Article 32 of the Patent Act allows an applicant to file an invention application and a utility-model application on the same day for the same invention ("一案兩請"), with the UM granted first and revoked when/if the invention grants. /PatentTwins exposes these dual-track pairs.
  • TW Trade Secrets Act — Taiwan was the second jurisdiction in the world (after Sweden) to enact a stand-alone trade-secrets statute (1996), with criminal penalties added 2013 and foreign-protection + secrecy-order reforms 2019. The only TW connector shipped today wraps this statute.
  • Traditional-Chinese applicant/inventor name strings. Latin-name fields exist but are routinely null for domestic applicants — TIPO is the only place to get the Chinese name.
  • Patent linkage register pointers (Article 60-1 of the Patent Act, 2019 amendments — the linkage register itself is at TFDA, but the patent-side metadata lives here).

§3 Programmatic surfaces

TIPO OpenData REST API (the headline asset)

Field Value
Endpoint https://cloud.tipo.gov.tw/S220/opdataapi/api/ — 15 GET operations
OAS spec /S220/opdata/api/file/oas — Swagger 2.0, 179 KB
Auth tk query-string token, issued by emailing a Word-form application to ipoid@tipo.gov.tw (form)
Format JSON or XML (negotiated via format= param)
Pagination top + skip; hard cap 6,000 rows per request (empirically verified)
Rate limit Not documented; no observed 429 on 10 rapid requests with the public demo tk
ToS Taiwan Open Government Data License v1.0 — perpetual / worldwide / sublicensable / CC-BY-4.0-compatible
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🟢 green — for biblio + status. Red for full-text/claims/figures.
Primary source TIPO OpenData portal

Real REST, real Swagger, clean license. The endpoints (/PatentAppl, /PatentPub, /PatentRights, /PatentPriority, /PatentAnnuity, /PatentAlteration, /PatentDivide, /PatentTwins, /PatentChange, /TmarkAppl, /TmarkRights, /TmarkPriority, /TmarkPics, /TmarkDivide, /TmarkChange) deliver bibliographic and status data only — there's no abstract, claims, description, or figures field anywhere in the OAS, and per-record full XMLs are pointed to via ftps://ftp.tipo.gov.tw/ URLs (not the HTTPS host). Backfile: patents to 1972, TMs to 1951.

TIPO bulk portal (cloud.tipo.gov.tw/S220/opdata)

Field Value
Endpoint https://cloud.tipo.gov.tw/S220/opdata — Next.js SPA
Auth None for downloads
Format ZIP-packed XML / CSV; weekly gazette + classification + applicant tables; XML detail per record on FTPS
ToS Same Taiwan OGDL v1.0
Verdict 🟡 yellow — works but violates our zero-corpus constraint; skip unless API quota becomes a blocker
Primary source Portal landing

Mentioned for completeness — the REST API supersedes it for the live-proxy use case.

iPKM patent/trademark search UI (the user-facing portal)

Field Value
Endpoint https://cloud.tipo.gov.tw/S400 — Next.js SPA launched 2024-12-18
Auth None (UI)
Format HTML / PDF
ToS UI license; scraping not addressed
Verdict 🔴 red — no documented API; do not scrape
Primary source TIPO News 2025-05-15

Replaces the TWPAT family, which TIPO scheduled offline 2025-04-25. The older connectors/tipo_taiwan.md survey's discussion of TWPAT / TWPAT-simple / TWPAT6 / GPSS is largely moot now — iPKM is the unified UI. Full-text / claims / figures live here behind a JS interface; not a proxy target.

Intellectual Property and Commercial Court (IPCC) decisions

Field Value
Endpoint judgment.judicial.gov.tw + ipc.judicial.gov.tw
Auth None (UI)
Format HTML / PDF in Chinese only
Verdict 🔴 red — no API; CN-only; no English equivalent of CanLII
Primary source IPCC EN site

Out of scope for any TIPO-style connector — different agency (Judicial Yuan, not MOEA). Tracked but not proxied.

§4 Fees

TIPO publishes patent and trade mark fee schedules in TWD. Both routes ship in the bundled patent_client_agents.fees connector as of 2026-05-19 (TW/TIPO/Fees/Patent, TW/TIPO/Fees/Trademark). Patent is a clean HTML scrape; TM is a curated catalog of 30 entries verified against the bilingual zh-TW + EN PDF.

  • Patent fees (EN, current): Schedule of Patent Fees — single HTML table, 34 line-items; covers invention (20-yr term), utility model (10-yr term), and design (15-yr term) patents under one Patent Act. Small-tier discount ("natural person, a school, or a small and medium-sized enterprise") applies to annuity years 1-3 and 4-6 across all three patent types; design year-1 SME annuity is NT$0.
  • Trademark fees (EN, current, effective 2024-05-01): Schedule of Trademark Fees 2024 — bilingual PDF (linked from the landing page). Per-class application (NT$3,000), registration (NT$2,500), and renewal on 10-year cycle (NT$4,000); per-good surcharge over 20 in a single class (NT$200/good); Class 35 retail surcharge over 5 designated services (NT$500/service).
  • Statutory basis: Patent Act (專利法, EN) Articles 92, 93, 96, 142, 159 (fee provisions) and the corresponding Patent Fee Regulations; Trademark Act (商標法, EN) Articles 33, 104 (renewal cycle and fee delegation).
  • Statutory basis — patents: Patent Act
  • Note on URL drift (2026-05-19): the legacy cp-289-... URLs in earlier surveys now 404; TIPO migrated to the /en/tipo2/<page-id>.html namespace.

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

  • patent_client_agents.tw_trade_secrets_corpus — TW/MOJ/TradeSecretsAct, the standalone Trade Secrets Act statute (1996, current 2024 form), shipping as a bundled SQLite/FTS5 corpus mirroring the IPO-India and DPMA shape currently being built on the feature/tw-trade-secrets-corpus branch.
  • Nothing else. No TIPO patent, UM, design, or trademark coverage in production.

What we should add

tipo_opdata — wrap the REST API. Verdict in §3 is green for biblio + status, which is exactly the surface our agent flows need for cite-checking, family-resolution backstop, applicant lookup, and TM watch. Specifics:

  • Auth: TIPO_API_KEY env var carrying the tk token; provisioned via the docx form mailed to ipoid@tipo.gov.tw.
  • Scope: all 15 OAS endpoints. The right-by-right mapping is:
  • Patent (invention) — /PatentAppl?applclass=1 + /PatentPub + /PatentRights?applclass=1 + /PatentPriority + /PatentAnnuity + /PatentAlteration.
  • Utility model — same endpoints with applclass=2. Plus /PatentTwins for one-application-two-rights cross-references.
  • Design — same endpoints with applclass=3 (Taiwan treats design as a Patent Act category).
  • Trademark — /TmarkAppl + /TmarkRights + /TmarkPriority + /TmarkPics + /TmarkDivide + /TmarkChange.
  • Pagination: standard top/skip helper with 6,000-row hard cap.
  • Provenance / attribution: surface a TIPO/MOEA attribution string in the response envelope per OGDL §3.2.
  • Caveats: biblio-only; no claim text. Document this clearly in the connector README so agents don't expect file-history depth.

The tw_statutes follow-on (Patent Act / Trademark Act / Copyright Act / IC Layout Act / Plant Variety) remains queued in BACKLOG.md — the Trade Secrets Act is row 1 and is shipping now; the other six belong in a shared tw_statutes corpus modeled on ipo_in_statutes and dpma_statutes.

Next steps

  1. Register a tk with TIPO (email the docx form to ipoid@tipo.gov.tw) — owner: maintainer. ETA unknown (no published SLA).
  2. Once tk arrives, write tipo_opdata connector spec under research/specs/ following the IP Australia template.
  3. Build tipo_opdata per CONNECTOR_STANDARDS.md. Add TW/TIPO/Patents, TW/TIPO/Trademarks, TW/TIPO/Designs, TW/TIPO/UtilityModels rows to coverage/sources.yaml at ship time. (Shipped 2026-05-18 — see src/patent_client_agents/tipo_opdata/.)
  4. Queue tw_statutes corpus (the remaining six IP statutes) for after tipo_opdata.

§6 Known unknowns

  • What does the tk issuance SLA look like for a foreign developer? The application form is Traditional-Chinese-only and asks for industry classification with no obvious "overseas" option. Pre-registration with a TW collaborator may be faster than trying solo. No primary source on foreign-applicant success rate found.
  • Daily / per-key quotas. The 6,000-rows-per-request cap is confirmed; no daily ceiling is published. TIPO presumably enforces something at the back-end — discover empirically once we hold a real tk.
  • FTPS detail handoff. Response payloads point at ftps://ftp.tipo.gov.tw/ftp/TmarkRights/000/TmarkRights_1_00083309.xml–style URLs for per-record detail. Does our CoWork allowlist + zero-infra constraint accommodate FTPS, or do we ship a biblio-only v1 and skip detail records? No primary source on whether FTPS will be replaced by HTTPS.
  • Token renewal / rotation cadence. Not documented anywhere. Plan for "as long as it works"; alert on status: "error" with a token-related message.
  • Chinese-only field content. Agent EN-only flows need a graceful-degradation policy when appl-name-e is null. Decide at connector-design time whether to upstream translate or leave to the agent.
  • WIPO Lex jurisdiction string. WIPO Lex labels Taiwan as "Taiwan Province of China"; our manifest should decide whether to remap to "Taiwan" for user-facing output. Consistency with TW/MOJ/TradeSecretsAct matters — that one uses "Taiwan."

§7 References

Primary sources only.

Last updated 2026-05-19.