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Copyright 2023 WIPO  Standard YouTube Licence Jane Lambert The WIPO's World Intellectual Property Indicators 2023   and the statistic that caught my eye is that India filed 31.6% more patent applications in 2022 than in the previous year. According to the accompanying press release, it extended an 11-year run of growth unmatched by any other country among the top 10 filers. India overtook the UK in the list of countries that filed the most patent applications in 2022.   There was a 1.7% growth in the worldwide number of patent applications in 2022 (3,457,400 in 2022 compared to 3,400,500 in 2021.  Some 1.58 million (or nearly half) of those patent applications came from China.  The USA came second with 505,539 applications, Japan third with 405,361, South Korea fourth with 272,315 and Germany fifth with 155,896.  The UK lay eighth with 53,536 between India with 55,718 and Switzerland with 49,077.   There was, however, a sharp...

Standard youtube Licence Jane Lambert The Patent Cooperation Treaty ("PCT") is an international agreement that makes it cheaper and easier for inventors or their employers to apply for patents for their inventions in more than one country. Readers who are unfamiliar with the PCT will find a very good video on the agreement on the WIPO website. The treaty came into force in 1978. In every year of the subsistence of the treaty up to 2019, the USA made more applications than any other country.   In 2019 China nosed ahead of the USA with 59,193 applications compared to the USA's 57,499. In 2020 it increased its lead to 68,720 over the USA's 59,230 (see  Annex 1: International patent applications by origin (PCT System)  to the press release  Innovation Perseveres: International Patent Filings via WIPO Continued to Grow in 2020 Despite COVID-19 Pandemic   2 March 2021). The number of applications from the UK also increased from 5,773 in 2019 to 5,9...

Jane Lambert The World Intellectual Property Organization its World Intellectual Property Indicators Report for 2020 on 7 Dec 2020. For the first time since the 2998 world economic downturn, there had been a 3% drop in patenting activity since 2018 but a sustained increase in the number of applications for trade marks, designs and plant breeders' rights.  The reason for the reduction in the number of patent applications from 3.3 million in 2018 to 3,2 million in 2019 is that the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) received 9.2% fewer applications in 2019 than it did in the previous year and the Japan Patent Office ("JPO") 1.8% fewer.  The CNIPA still received 1.2 million patent applications which was more than any other office. The US Patent and Trademark Office came second with 621,453, the JPO third with 307,969, the Korea Intellectual Property Office fourth with 218,975 and the European Patent Office fifth with 181,479.  Intellectual property ...

Addicted04 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) Jane Lambert The most striking slide of Francis Gurry 's  Briefing for Member States and Other Stakeholders   of the World Intellectual Property Organization  which he presented on 7 April 2020 is #16,  China surpassed the U.S. as the top source of international patent applications in 2019.  Last year China made 58,890 international patent applications compared to 57,849 from the USA and 52,660 from Japan. According to the same slide, the USA made more patent applications than any other country in 2009.  China lay a long way behind the USA, Japan and Germany with roughly the same number of applications as South Korea and France. The UK came in #7 with 5,786 international patent applications in 2019 if anyone is interested. That is less than 10% of the Chinese figure. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.  I was at a domain ...

Jane Lambert The World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") published its World Intellectual Property Indicators 2018   on 16 Oct 2019.  In September 2019, the Intellectual Property Office published  Facts and figures: patent, trade mark, design and hearing data: 2018   for the UK. The headline figures that appear on page 7 of the WIPO report is that there were over 3.3 million patent applications in 2018 which is 5.2% above the figure for 2017. China accounted for 46.4% of those applications with over 1.5 million. That was an increase of 11.6% on the number of Chinese applications for the previous year. The USA was number 2 with 597, a 1.6% decline on the figure for the previous year.  Japan came a distant third with 313,567 applications. China accounted for more than half of the world's 14.3 million trade mark applications with 7.4 million applications. Again the USA came in second with 640,181 and Japan third with 512,156.  Chin...

Jane Lambert Earlier this year the World Intellectual Property Organization  published WIPO IP Facts and Figures 2018 .  This is a compendium   of statistics on worldwide patent, design and trade mark filings.  The headline figures are that there were 3.17 million patent applications around the world in 2017, as well as 1.78 million utility model applications, 12.39 million trade mark applications and 1.24 million applications for the registration of industrial designs.  The lion's share of those application cams from Asia with 97.1% of the world's utility model, 67.9% of its industrial design, 66.6% of its trade mark and 65.1% of its patent filings.  North America came second in patenting with 20.3% and Europe third with 11.2% but Europe was ahead of North America in trade mark, industrial design and utility model registrations.  Some 85.1% of the world's 3.17 million patent applications were filed with the world's top five ...

Photo Adrian Pingstone Reproduction kindly licensed by the author Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert The IPO  has published details of the  China IP Roadshow 2017  when our IP attaché, Tom Duke,  will tour Scotland and the North of England between 18 and 20 Sept. My chambers are assisting with the Yorkshire leg of his tour and I can tell you that there have been a lot of enquiries and we are already into double figures with the bookings. If you want to attend the Leeds event call my clerk Steve on 020 7404 5252 or send him an email  without delay. Most British businesses do very well in China but things can go wrong sometimes. When they do, they can have repercussions here. That is where I come in.  Here are some of the problems that occasionally arise: The British trade mark of a company that applies to register that mark in China is opposed, invalidated or revoked; A company that imports goods from China for distribution in the UK fi...

Author Ssolbergj Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International Licence Source Wikipedia Jane Lambert Some homework for those who are coming to hear our IP attaché, Tom Duke , speak about Succeeding in China - How to mitigate IP risk in Barnsley, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London or Manchester this September. The Intellectual Property Office has produced a very helpful guide entitled  Intellectual property rights in China .   A quick read of this guide before he speaks will enable you to make the most of Mr Duke's talk, especially if you are new to the subject. Although our law differs from China's in detail the basic concepts are the same because China is a member of many of the same international agreements to which we belong. Thus patents protect new inventions. trade marks brands, copyrights literary and artistic works and so on. But there are some rights in Chima that do not exist in our law such...

Jane Lambert An important part of my work is connected with China. Hardly surprising given the size of its population, territory and GDP and increasing importance in science, technology and the arts. I am often asked to draft or review distribution, joint venture, licensing, manufacturing or other agreements for British businesses that wish to supply, invest in, or import from, China and, increasingly, for Chinese businesses that wish to supply or invest in us. Yesterday I received an email from Tom Duke  who is Her Majesty's IP Attaché to China and Hong Kong advising me of his work.  He wrote: "My team and I support over 200 British companies a year with IP issues in China. We help companies of all sizes navigate the Chinese IP system, helping to improve their IP outcomes. We publish a regular China IP Newsletter ( here ) and a series of business factsheets ( here ). In addition to company support, I also run the UK’s bilateral policy programmes on IP ...