Access to IPRs

This insightful article from LINE Publication features Laurie Self and Holly Fechner as they highlight the progress that is being made to make the patent system as accessible as possible.

Less than 13% of all inventors listed on U.S. patents are women and Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and multiracial Americans account for even less at only 8% of all U.S. inventors. Qualcomm and Invent Together are partnering to try and tackle this inequality, as well as signifying the importance of universities, non-profits and other stakeholders in understanding the diversity gaps and helping to close them.

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Artificial Intelligence is rapidly evolving to provide accurate information and solutions to problems. AI solutions can be extremely useful in many fields of endeavor.

There are various components and aspects of such systems. Currently, there is some uncertainty – especially with respect to patent protection – as to how intellectual property (IP) rights can be used to protect those components along with the outputs of AI systems.

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Heated debates have taken place at the WTO TRIPS Council over Covid-19 vaccine patents and IP rights, with ongoing discussions still taking place among diplomats from the US, India, South Africa, and the EU. For vaccine researchers, manufacturers, and public experts, though, the focus may have moved on some time ago, says Alan Beattie in a new “trade secrets” posting for the FT. Governments seem also to be shifting focus to emphasize practical efforts to extend  manufacturing and distribution capacity globally; by way of example, the EU recently announced a €1bn contribution to finance the German company BioNTech to set up a mobile vaccine manufacturing plant in Africa assembled from kits.

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Invent Together is a coalition of organizations, universities, companies, and other stakeholders dedicated to understanding the diversity gaps in invention and patenting. It aims to support public policy and private initiatives working to close the diversity gap. They have been supporting the adoption of the Inventor Diversity for Economic Advancement (IDEA) Act, which would require the USPTO to collect data on inventors’ demographic data on a voluntary basis and make this information available in the aggregate for research.

The IDEA Act has recently passed the House as part of the America COMPETES Act. As the House and Senate negotiate a compromise, Invent Together is calling for Congress to keep the IDEA Act in the final version sent to President Biden’s office.

Invent Together has written a sign-on letter urging congressional leadership to keep the IDEA Act in the final innovation and competition bill which can be found here.

Although consumers may feel they are yet to feel the transformative impact of 5G, the infrastructure underpinning its wider rollout is being developed quickly and on a significant scale. With such development, we are quickly approaching the much-heralded 5G era, where we will see more of the opportunities from 5G come to fruition. As a result, the digital ecosystem will become available in many more corners of everyday life.

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The Route to Market (R2M) series is being developed by the Department of Research Contracts & Innovation (RC&I) at the University of Cape Town using funding from the Department of Science and Technology’s National Intellectual Property Office (NIPMO). Each booklet focuses on a specific sector/product type and highlights the key steps and considerations in bringing such a product to market in that sector – with an emphasis on the local South African context.

The hope is that this guide on Medical Devices and other booklets, such as this guide on Pharmaceutical Products will be useful to both Researchers and Innovators, as well as Technology Transfer professionals working at institutional Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs).

The books have been released under a Creative Commons license to enable other institutions to customise them for their own use.

This series of virtual events will take a look at the IP gender gap in the Americas region. Political leaders, heads of IP offices, economists, and scholars will discuss how best to attract underrepresented groups to use the patent system, what data needs to be collected in order to understand the gap, and how to interpret new and existing data in order to develop solutions that will help close the gap.

The High-Level Policy panel will take place on 13 October, 5:30-6:30pm CET // 11:30am-12:30pm EDT // 8:30-9:30am PDT.

The IP Economist panel will take place on 14 October, 5-7pm CET // 11am-1pm EDT // 8-10am PDT.

Read the full story and register.