UN Notes Largest Patent Filings Drop In 30 Years
ABC News - Money: As an accurate indicator of innovation and business health, patents are among the best, and a recent report confirms the recent economic downturn's effect on intellectual property protections. UN Patent Filings Dropped for 1st Time Since 1978 via the Associated Press provides more clarity to this relationship:
The number of international patent filings dropped last year for the first time since 1978 as companies hit by the global economic downturn sought fewer new protections on their intellectual property, the U.N. said Monday.
Most patents filed in 2009 were for computer technology, followed by pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. Innovations in computer chip design and nanotechnology saw the greatest rise in patents.
The World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, received about 155,900 international patent filings last year, a drop of 4.5 percent compared with the nearly 164,000 filings received a year earlier.
The US is still leading the way with a significant percentage of total international patent filings but this number is over 10 percent less than the previous year. Interestingly, if a patent applicant would like IP protection in "any or all" of the 142 U.N. Patent Cooperation Treaty member nations, they need only pay a fee to the organization to cover the costs and vagaries of navigating international patent law.
ArsTechnica.com: Nate Anderson has some thought-provoking ideas on copyright protection in his recent topical piece, Contextualizing the copyright debate: reward vs. creativity. One of the highlights of his discussion of the battle field of copyright law is his reference to a very influential speech in 1841 by Thomas Macaulay, a member of the House of Commons in the British Parliament. Here are some selected passages of the speech and Anderson's comments on it:
"It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."
But why should authors be paid—was it because they had the inalienable right to control their own work in perpetuity? No. "It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books; we cannot have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated; and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright."
Again, the goal is society-wide progress, but copyright should not last "a day longer than is necessary" to secure it.
Of course, as an author himself making a living dependent of intellectual property (IP), Anderson expresses hesitancy to embrace such a strident restriction on copyright protections. "...[T]aking this policy to its limit, copyright law only needs to help creators earn a single penny more than the smallest amount of money they need to keep creating. That sounds like a pretty miserable existence, one in which creators might never make much of a living even as they keep a culture vibrant and entertained." What's the solution, then, to the increasingly restrictive and innovation-squashing measures enacted to protect the status quo? Read Anderson's complete piece at the above link to find out the answer this valid concern.
Ottawa Citizen: From north of the border we learn how one company is leveraging unwanted intellectual property assets to help them focus on their core business competencies. From Dave Pugliese's OSI to sell off soldier systems intellectual property, will now concentrate on maritime market:
Under the terms of this contract, OSI Geospatial will sell all of its rights to its soldier systems intellectual property. The company will recognize the benefits from this transaction in its first quarter ending February 28, 2010.
OSI Geospatial is working to divest non-core assets that are not aligned with its maritime strategy. The funds from the sale of these non-core assets will strengthen the company's balance sheet and provide the resources to further develop its core technologies and expand its marketing capabilities in support of developing its high-growth maritime niche markets.
Valued at $6.5 million, the divestiture of this IP will allow OSI "to take advantage of the growth opportunities" in the maritime market segment.
Patently-O: One of the biggest stumbling blocks facing the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is a woefully underfunded budget, but that's not the only financial problem looming large for the nation's intellectual property overlords.
A major reason for the current USPTO budget shortfall is the dropping rate of renewal. According to the USPTO annual reports, the "maintenance fees have traditionally been the largest category of patent fees." Renewal rates are charged in three-stages. The first-stage payment of $980 is due 3.5 years after issuance. The second-stage payment of $2,480 is due 7.5 years after issuance. And, the third-stage payment of $4,110 is due 11.5 years after issuance.
In FY2009 renewal rates dropped for each stage. Most troubling for future PTO revenue, the first-stage renewal rate for FY2009 was the lowest in a decade.
Check out the rest of the piece, including a colorful, shiny graph and some lively comments, in USPTO Budget Shortfall Causes: Maintenance Fees.
ScienceMag.org: A lively fight is sure to break out when two competing concerns are awarded a patent for "reprogramming somatic cells" which is a fancy way of saying "turning adult mammalian cells into stem cells that can in principle become any kind of cell in the body." Dennis Normile has more for the gentle, constant reader.
In what may presage an intellectual property battle, Rudolf Jaenisch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Konrad Hochedlinger of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston will be awarded a patent on a technique for turning adult mammalian cells into stem cells that can in principle become any kind of cell in the body. The approach—reprogramming somatic cells—promises to be a boon for regenerative medicine. But other groups have similar patent claims pending, and some researchers worry that a tangle of patents could delay medical applications.
The pending award of the patent was announced on 4 February by Fate Therapeutics, a San Diego-based company that Jaenisch and others founded in 2007. The November 2003 application describes a possible approach to somatic cell reprogramming. "With its early priority dates and territory reach, the Jaenisch portfolio is formidable," Paul Grayson, president of Fate Therapeutics, said in a press release. Fate "is counting on this patent to raise funding, so they will be relentless" in pushing their claims, says stem cell researcher Jeanne Loring of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. "It's the nature of the biotech business."
The hedgerow surrounding the technology behind the patent is labyrinthine and daunting to navigate, causing some to speculate that the way forward might involve some legal chainsaw work, resulting in a bit of chaos and damage. Read Normile's Landmark Pluripotent Patent Has Stem Cell Researchers Nervous for more on this issue.
MediLexicon: Things are heating up in the genetic patent arena with opponents of the practice rightfully cautioning against the wholesale cordoning off of the human DNA for sale to the highest bidder. In question are two particular patents for gene tests related to breast and ovarian cancer under review by U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet.
The plaintiffs also argue that because all humans have genes, the patents infringe on freedom of scientific inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, as well as undermine a person's right to know about his or her genetic makeup. They contend that gene patents make cancer research more difficult by requiring scientists to obtain licenses from the patent holder.
The creators of the tests for the cancers claim that patents are necessary to fund the R&D costs of such efforts. "Without the patents, there wouldn't have been the financial incentive" to create the tests, Myriad general counsel Rick Marsh offered. The descriptively-titled Judge Hears Arguments In Challenge To Patents On Genes Tied To Breast, Ovarian Cancer offers more on this important case and should offer the interested party a deeper understanding of what's at stake in the patenting of human genetic materials.
Bonus IP piece o' the day: Black Duck patents OSS software license conflict analysis by Ryan Paul at ArsTechnica.com.
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