ROROP is Restoration of the Right of Priority. This is a procedure that an applicant might pursue because it:
- missed the 12-month due date for foreign filing in a utility patent case, or
- missed the 6-month due date for foreign filing in a design case.
As for the former, the filer might be doing an ordinary Paris Convention filing or might be doing a PCT filing. As for the latter, the filer might be doing an ordinary Paris Convention filing.
In many Offices around the world, the reason for ROROP being available is that the Office involved is in a country that has chosen to join or at least comply with the Patent Law Treaty.
Some Offices also offer a domestic counterpart to ROROP. In the US, for example, a filer who filed a US provisional patent application and missed the 12-month period for filing a US non-provisional application can use a purely domestic procedure that is very like ROROP.
Across all of these procedures is a common requirement that the corrective action for missing the due date must be attended to within two months, that is, by 14 months for utility subject matter or by 8 months for design subject matter.
(OPLF has handled many cases transferred in from other counsel, where such a 12-month or 6-month period was missed by previous counsel, and where OPLF made use of ROROP.)