The New Zealand government is now looking to accelerate the extinction of these dinosaurs. It has published draft legislation that will amend the transitional provisions of the 2013 Act such that any further divisional applications, filed more than three months after commencement of the amendments, will effectively be subject to many of the elevated standards of the current act, rather than the lower standards that applied under the old act. The idea seems to be that such applications would either be invalid (if they fail to meet the higher standards required under the current law) or could be granted as patents only to the extent that they substantially satisfy the same requirements that would apply had the originating application been filed on or after 13 September 2014.
On 18 March 2025 the New Zealand government published a notice seeking feedback on the draft legislation. Any submissions are due no later than 5pm (New Zealand time, which is earlier in the day almost everywhere else in the world) on 1 April 2025. That does not allow much time to review and respond to the draft! It should, however, be noted that the scope of the consultation is very narrow. The government is not interested in hearing from anyone who disagrees with the policy or legislative intent (which was supposedly addressed in an earlier consultation) – the sole subject of feedback being sought is ‘whether the drafting of the Bill achieves the policy intent or could have unintended consequences.’
When I saw the notice, I was curious about the extent of the impact this proposed legislation would have on applicants and the New Zealand patent system generally. I wondered how may applications would be implicated after all these years, and whether there are particular applicants that have been ‘exploiting’ the transition provisions more than others (spoiler alert: it turns out that there are). So that is what this article is mostly about.
Today, something a little different for this blog. As many readers are aware, for the past couple of years I have been working towards a PhD in which, very broadly speaking, I have been looking at applying machine learning, AI and language models to the analysis of patent claims (in particular, to assessing the scope of claims). Most recently, I have been exploring how it might be possible to apply large language models – the types of AI behind popular chat services such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude (my personal chatbot of choice), Meta’s LLaMa and (yes) Chinese newcomer DeepSeek – to this task. To experiment with ‘open source’ (
My latest analysis of patent filing data for 2024 confirms a shift that has been years in the making – Chinese applicants have finally overtaken Australian residents to become the second largest source of patent applications, behind only the United States. This milestone comes as US filings showed a notable decline of 5.7%, while Chinese applications continued their steady growth with a 7.2% increase over the previous year.
Those of you who have been following my journey over the past couple of years will be aware that I am currently conducting PhD research at Melbourne Law School, investigating patent claim scope and its relationship to patent system performance. I have now reached a critical stage in the project where I need help from people with hands-on experience reading, analysing, and working with patent claims.
