IP Management
What You Need to Know About Seeking Patent Protection Overseas
There was a time when inventors did not have to worry about protecting intellectual property outside their country, largely because products were typically conceived, manufactured and purchased within a circumscribed territory. However, the rise of globalization has changed this. Now, a product produced in one corner of the globe can easily be sold and manufactured all over the world. This new economy presents challenges for patent applicants and/or inventors, one of them being how to ensure that an invention is protected in countries that have easy access to your product or process. The solution lies in filing a patent application in any market-target country — expanding your rights there and making it difficult for competitors to use your products or technology without due authorization.
Unprecedented: The Rapid Innovation Response to COVID-19 and the Role of Intellectual Property
On 26 November the new research report about the role that intellectual property played in the development, manufacturing, and global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics was launched in Geneva. The report was co-authored by Innovation Council’s very own Jennifer Brant, and Prof. Mark Schultz.
The report, along with other materials including an executive summary is available here.
Considering All Sides of Medicines Patents
For many years, policy experts and others have engaged in wide-ranging debates about patents on pharmaceuticals, particularly in developing countries. On the one hand, it has been argued that IP protection provides crucial incentives to the pharmaceutical industry to undertake more research on tropical diseases. On the other hand, the patenting of pharmaceuticals has been criticised as causing challenges regarding access to medicines. The brief examines in detail the rationale for patenting medicines. The examination includes an investigation into the role of the patent system in relation to the pharmaceutical industry, the moral limits of patents, how the exclusion of a patent can create social costs, the rationale for the patenting of medicines and the incentive theory and how this can be balanced with access to medicines.
Patenting and Covid-19 Vaccines
Patents have had an important role in organising the collaborations that led to the development and commercialization of COVID-19 vaccines. Patenting is a crucial tool in research-based industries like pharmaceuticals and biologics and can be a means to encourage collaboration. Terms can be negotiated to have different types of expertise combined in one project. The virus will likely garner another sort of PIP-type or any other similar program which will encourage contractual licensing of innovative IP in exchange for access to specialized expertise or important biological data. Monopolisation should clearly be avoided, and patent pooling must be the way forward to obtain sufficient vaccines for Covid-19 as early as possible.
Patent grants up 5.9% at IP5 offices in 2019
Patents played an even more important role in 2019 to protect intellectual property. According to the latest IP5 Statistics Report, the world’s five largest IP offices granted 1.6 million patents in 2019, an increase of 5.9% on the previous year. The total number includes 2.7 million patent applications filed at the IP5 offices in 2019.
The annual patent statistics published by the European Patent Office, the Japan Patent Office, the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the China National Intellectual Property Administration and the United States Patent and Trademark Office were used for this analysis. If you are curious about the 2020 EPO statistics – they will be published in March.