Guide of Patent Protection

For the last couple years, the IEEE has taken a lot of raw data about patents in a variety of industry segments, added a bit of massaging and come up with what it calls an Adjusted Pipeline Power number in an attempt to illustrate which companies wield the most influence and prowess around the world, based on their patent portfolio.

Here’s how it works. The raw number of patents a company was awarded in a year - 2007, in this most recent report - is multiplied by the product of these variables:

• Pipeline growth is patent activity for the year compared to the average of the five years previous.
• Pipeline impact indicates how often all patents cited a company’s patents from the five years previous.
• Pipeline generality indicates the variety among technologies citing that company’s patents.
• Pipeline originality indicates the variety among technologies that a company’s patents are based upon.

Adjusted pipeline impact then takes into account self-citation, or a company’s citations of its own patents which, as it increases, causes the resulting estimation of patent power to decrease. The result is the Adjusted Pipeline Power, which estimates the company’s “overall patent power.”

Though they don’t give a window directly into the quality of these patents, of course, the rankings are particularly interesting this year, given the fact that from auto makers to tech startups, short-term profit taking has devastated the type of R&D that once kept American companies the innovation leaders.

As IT Business Edge’s Ann All wrote, the need for those profits, along with reduced R&D tax credits, mean that what R&D is being carried out is more development than research. And taking away the research foundation quickly squeezes the quality out of resulting products.

IT Business Edge’s Carl Weinschenk says that in terms of which companies will survive the crisis and which won’t, startups and smaller companies will necessarily perish first, since their cushion against realizing those short-term profits is so much smaller and their access to potential capital investments from larger companies has disappeared. But innovation across the board will fall along with revenues.

IEEE points out a couple of bright spots that are bucking that trend for 2007; electronic ink firm E Ink made the list last year and has seen its technology frequently cited by a high number of industry peers and used in Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, and semiconductor manufacturing company Novellus rose in its segment ranking from 17 in 2006 to 3 in 2007. It also is seeing its technology patents cited by the likes of IBM, Intel, NEC and Samsung. Both are U.S. firms.

Patent-protecting Microsoft takes the top spot in the rankings for Computer Software, which is not surprising. However, you may be surprised to find that, aside from number-two Germany-based SAP AG, the rest of the top 20 spots are also filled by U.S. firms.

Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturing rankings are led by FormFactor Inc., another U.S. company, and Semiconductor Manufacturing is led by U.S.-based Intel. The U.S.’s Cisco leads the Telecom Equipment rankings, with the rest of the top 20 spots dotted with a few European companies. And Computer Systems is led by IBM and HP. Japan-based Fujitsu Limited is in the third spot there; Japanese firms make their strongest showing in the Electronics segment.

And in looking at the entire set of results, Microsoft received the highest Adjusted Pipeline Power rating of any company in any segment. But you know what they say about statistics.

PCT-Anmeldung in Indien

National Phase Eintrag von PCT-Anmeldung:

Alle PCT-Anmeldungen die Bestimmung Indien sind als indische Patentanmeldungen mit dem Datum der internationalen Anmeldung. Die Frist für die Eingabe in die nationale Phase ist 31 Monate ab dem Prioritätsdatum.
Im Folgenden werden die grundlegenden Anforderungen für die Einreise in die nationale Phase in Indien:
(i) Anwendung, in dem die Bezeichnung der Erfindung, Namen, Anschriften und Staatsangehörigkeit der Erfinder; Antragsteller.
(ii) Vollständige Spezifikation wie sie vor dem Internationalen Büro mit Forderungen, Zeichnungen und Zusammenfassung. Ist der Antrag in einer anderen Sprache als Englisch Sprache dann eine beglaubigte englische Übersetzung des gleichen.
(iii) vorgeschriebenen Gebühren in bar / mit Scheck lokalen / durch die Nachfrage Entwurf.
Sobald die nationalen Verarbeitung begonnen hat, die folgenden Dokumente müssen erbracht werden entweder zusammen mit der Anwendung oder innerhalb der vorgeschriebenen Zeit-Rahmen:
(i) Zuordnung Tat, wenn der Antragsteller ist nicht der Erfinder,
(ii) Erklärung der Erfindererklärung durch den Anmelder,
(iii) Erklärung und Unternehmen in Bezug auf den Status der entsprechenden Anwendungen in anderen Ländern alle sechs Monate,
(iv) Vollmacht an den Agenten (ordnungsgemäß abgestempelt),
(v) Kopie des PCT/IB/304 oder Priority Dokument. Wenn eine Priorität Dokument ist in irgendeiner anderen Sprache als Englisch eine englische Übersetzung der gleichen zusammen mit Zertifizierung zur Unterstützung der gleiche.
(vi) International Search Report
(vii) der internationalen vorläufigen Prüfungsbericht, falls vorhanden.
Zum Zeitpunkt der nationalen Phase Eintrag, Änderungen der internationalen Anmeldung können gemacht werden, aber diese Änderungen können nicht über das hinausgehen, die Offenlegung in der ursprünglichen Anmeldung. Keine Fremdstoffe oder neue Sache ist, hinzugefügt werden.
Es ist möglich, eine vollständige Spezifikation in Bezug auf zwei oder mehrere vorläufige Spezifikationen, wenn die Erfindung in ihnen verwandt ist oder die Entwicklung der jeweils anderen. Allerdings gibt es keine Entspannung in der Zahlung von Gebühren.
Im Falle der PCT-Anmeldung Antrag für die Prüfung muss innerhalb von 48 Monaten ab dem Datum der Priorität.
Nach einem Antrag zur Prüfung eingereicht wird und die Anwendung wurde in der Patent-Journal, der Controller gewöhnlich weist der Antrag auf ein Prüfer innerhalb eines Monats nach der Anfrage. Der Prüfer prüft den Antrag und stellt ein offizieller Bericht an die Controller normalerweise innerhalb eines Monats, jedoch nicht mehr als drei Monate. Der Controller wird dann kommunizieren, den Bericht dem Anmelder normalerweise innerhalb eines Monats. Ein Antrag wird für die folgenden Fragen:
(i) die Neuheit, die
(ii) Sinnfälligkeit,
(iii) Utility,
(iv) im Rahmen der Patentierbarkeit Patents Act, 1970 und in der geänderten Fassung, und
(v) Antizipation.
Der Anmelder ist 12 Monate Zeit, um auf die Fragen, die in den Prüfungsbericht, ohne Verlängerung welcher. Sobald Einwände erfüllt sind, ist der Antrag angenommen durch den Controller, und danach, eine Andeutung für die Annahme wird durch das Patentamt und nach der Beseitigung einer etwaigen vorher gewähren Opposition und Weitergabe von sechs Monaten ab dem Datum der Veröffentlichung.
Nach Ablauf von sechs Monaten ab dem Datum der Veröffentlichung und die Entsorgung von einem im Voraus erteilen Opposition, Erteilung des Patents wird in der Patent-Journal und einen Letter Patent-Dokument ausgestellt werden.

Gewährung von Patent ist gültig für 20 Jahre ab dem Beginn der Internationalen Anmeldungen. Es muss jedes Jahr erneuert, indem vorgeschriebenen Gebühr ab dem dritten Jahr nach dem Jahr der Einreichung der internationalen Patentanmeldung binnen drei Monaten nach der Andeutung. Nach ein Patent erteilt worden ist, Fabrikate im Rahmen der patentierten Erfindung Mai vertreten sein als “Patentiert.”Die Zahl der Patent muss auf dem Produkt.

For the last couple years, the IEEE has taken a lot of raw data about patents in a variety of industry segments, added a bit of massaging and come up with what it calls an Adjusted Pipeline Power number in an attempt to illustrate which companies wield the most influence and prowess around the world, based on their patent portfolio.

Here’s how it works. The raw number of patents a company was awarded in a year - 2007, in this most recent report - is multiplied by the product of these variables:

• Pipeline growth is patent activity for the year compared to the average of the five years previous.
• Pipeline impact indicates how often all patents cited a company’s patents from the five years previous.
• Pipeline generality indicates the variety among technologies citing that company’s patents.
• Pipeline originality indicates the variety among technologies that a company’s patents are based upon.

Adjusted pipeline impact then takes into account self-citation, or a company’s citations of its own patents which, as it increases, causes the resulting estimation of patent power to decrease. The result is the Adjusted Pipeline Power, which estimates the company’s “overall patent power.”

Though they don’t give a window directly into the quality of these patents, of course, the rankings are particularly interesting this year, given the fact that from auto makers to tech startups, short-term profit taking has devastated the type of R&D that once kept American companies the innovation leaders.

As IT Business Edge’s Ann All wrote, the need for those profits, along with reduced R&D tax credits, mean that what R&D is being carried out is more development than research. And taking away the research foundation quickly squeezes the quality out of resulting products.

IT Business Edge’s Carl Weinschenk says that in terms of which companies will survive the crisis and which won’t, startups and smaller companies will necessarily perish first, since their cushion against realizing those short-term profits is so much smaller and their access to potential capital investments from larger companies has disappeared. But innovation across the board will fall along with revenues.

IEEE points out a couple of bright spots that are bucking that trend for 2007; electronic ink firm E Ink made the list last year and has seen its technology frequently cited by a high number of industry peers and used in Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, and semiconductor manufacturing company Novellus rose in its segment ranking from 17 in 2006 to 3 in 2007. It also is seeing its technology patents cited by the likes of IBM, Intel, NEC and Samsung. Both are U.S. firms.

Patent-protecting Microsoft takes the top spot in the rankings for Computer Software, which is not surprising. However, you may be surprised to find that, aside from number-two Germany-based SAP AG, the rest of the top 20 spots are also filled by U.S. firms.

Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturing rankings are led by FormFactor Inc., another U.S. company, and Semiconductor Manufacturing is led by U.S.-based Intel. The U.S.’s Cisco leads the Telecom Equipment rankings, with the rest of the top 20 spots dotted with a few European companies. And Computer Systems is led by IBM and HP. Japan-based Fujitsu Limited is in the third spot there; Japanese firms make their strongest showing in the Electronics segment.

And in looking at the entire set of results, Microsoft received the highest Adjusted Pipeline Power rating of any company in any segment. But you know what they say about statistics.

If you are employed as a scientist or as a company do research anywhere in California, including cities where biotechnology and other medical science is being studied or where research takes place, especially the areas around cities such as Irvine, Orange County, San Diego, Los Angeles, La Jolla, Riverside, Fullerton, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and other cities where there are universities or large research projects taking place in the U.S. and throughout the world, you know that patent laws and patent licensing is acting as a barrier to medical and biotechnology research and preventing advances in science.

 

It doesn’t take a California patent attorney or lawyer to say how the world’s patent system is today acting as a barrier to medical and biotechnology research that could solve many of today’s worst diseases and preventing breakthrough treatments, medicines and even new seeds for better crops.

 

A new report has come out after a seven year study and confirmed what most patent licensing lawyers, medical researchers and biotechnologists have known for years. The patent system in force worldwide is broken and preventing breakthroughs in science.

 

Without a means for sharing information, blocking patents are causing delays in developing advances in cancer medicine treatments and in the development of new food crops.

 

The report performed by a Canada based partnership cited as examples of medical advances being delayed as those of HIV/Aids drugs and cancer screening tests.

 

Of concern to scientists is an increasingly bare medicine chest of new life-saving medicines that are critical not just to the developing world but to the industrialized nations as well to address disease. New food crops are also lagging behind that could help address hunger.

 

And while stem cell researchers apparently patent the most, they collaborate least according to the report.

 

What happens is that “blocking patents” act as barriers to research and advances in biotechnology that could advance cancer treatment, new medicines and new crops.

 

When biotech firms race to file a “fortress” of patents around newly discovered genes, research by their competitors is effectively blocked.

 

Another example given by scientists is work on genes that cause breast cancer in European countries that has been held up by patents held on specific genes by one biotech company in the U.S. With patients in European countries unable to meet the cost of certain cancer screening tests, they have been effectively denied access to such tests.

 

A recommendation of the report is that companies should be allowed to form “patent pools” where they could cross-license their patented technologies without losing royalties from their patents. It is also recommended that governments develop other public and private partnerships to conduct joint research.

 

The criticism of the current patenting system is that it acts more as a barrier than as an incentive to research and the development of medical or other biotechnological breakthroughs.

 

When a patent office grants dangerously broad patents, entirely new areas of research, such as in the field of nanotechnology, can be cut off.

 

So long as intellectual property and patent laws act as a barrier from others utilizing and expanding upon one scientist’s research, the laws will prevent scientists from making advances that can benefit mankind. This lack of sharing is preventing biotechnology from becoming the field that it once promised. 

 

If you have a patent legal issue in Irvine, Orange County, La Jolla, San Diego, in the Inland Empire, Los Angeles, Palm Springs or anywhere in Southern California, we have the knowledge and resources to be your Newport Beach Patent Lawyer and your Palm Springs Patent Attorney. Be sure to hire a California law firm with patent and licensing lawyers who can serve areas such as Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Anaheim, Irvine, Newport Beach, Carlsbad, Corona del Mar, Laguna Beach, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Rancho Cucamonga, Ontario, Fullerton, Del Mar, San Diego, Orange County, San Luis Obispo, Buena Park, La Jolla, Oxnard, Ventura, La Quinta, and Santa Barbara so you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.

 

If you need to file for a patent or have an patent legal issue of any kind, call the Law Offices of R. Sebastian Gibson, or visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com  and learn how we can assist you. You can also call us to speak directly to Sebastian Gibson on the phone about your legal matter.

The major concern that the social and economic costs of introducing pharmaceutical patents are likely to outweigh the benefits in the case of most developing countries suggests a cautious approach to intellectual property protection in the area of pharmaceuticals. On the other side, there is also evidence that the patent system has a detrimental impact on pharmaceutical prices, particularly if the product itself is protectable.

The WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) introduced intellectual property rules into the multilateral trading system for the first time. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only most powerful legislative and judicial body which makes an economic relationship between trade and nations with its “free trade” agenda.

The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is a treaty administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO) which sets down minimum standards for forms of intellectual property (IP) regulation that was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty in 1994. The new WTO regime effectively outlawed the generic production of new medicines

It was made mandatory by the WTO for its developing nations to fully abide by their IP laws and enforcement practices with the agreement on TRIPS by no later than 1st January 2005. It lays down minimum standards for protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in member countries which are required to promote effective and adequate protection of intellectual property rights with a view to reducing distortions and impediments to international trade. For the least-developed countries (LDCs) the transition period will remain in force for pharmaceutical patents and data protection at least until 2016 under Article 66.1 of TRIPS under paragraph 7 of the Doha Declaration.

Further, Article 27 of the TRIPS Agreement harmonizes the subject matter of patent in a broad manner which clearly states that the patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application and patent rights enjoyable without discrimination as to the place of invention, the field of technology and whether products are imported or locally produced.

Under article 28 (1) (a) of TRIPS, there are exclusive rights for product patents to prevent third parties not having the owner’s consent from the acts of: making, using, offering for sale, selling, or importing for these purposes that product.

Overall, the TRIPS Agreement will have a substantial impact on intellectual property regimes in developing countries. Although, under the TRIPS Agreement member countries are bound to provide such protection, yet certain compensatory measures and schemes are taken in the hands to avoid the negative impact of monopolization of product patents especially in health and pharmaceutical sectors. Such measures as per the TRIPS are as follows:

• Transition periods
• Compulsory Licensing
• Public, non-commercial use of patents
• Parallel imports
• Exceptions to patent rights
• Exceptions from patentability; and
• Limits on data protection

India as a member of WTO, tried to make its patent legislation TRIPS compliant by bringing into force the Patents (Amendment) Act 2005 w.e.f. 1st January, 2005 which provided for product patents - a long debated issue globally and nationally.

Making the patent legislation in compliance with the TRIPS would put India in the row of nations having strong patent legislation. Salient features of the Patents (Amendment) Act 2005 related to product patents:

a) Extension of product patent protection to products in sectors of drugs, foods and chemical.
b) Term for protection of product patent shall be for 20 years.
c) Introduction of a provision for enabling grant of compulsory license for export of medicines to countries which have insufficient or no manufacturing capacity; provided such importing country has either granted a compulsory license for import or by notification or otherwise allowed importation of the patented pharmaceutical products from India (in accordance with the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health)
d) A new provision has been introduced that provides that the mere discovery of a new form of a known substance which does not result in the enhancement of the known efficacy of that substance or the mere discovery of any new property or new use for a known substance or of the mere use of a known process, machine or apparatus unless such known process results in a new product or employs at least one new reactant, shall not be patentable.

These amendments have been made with the intention to make India drug and pharma industries competitive at par with multinational companies. The generic drugs would have a limitation and the MNCs would enjoy monopolistic rights, however there is a silver lining in this concept that it would attract contract R&D and therefore MNCs would prefer to open their R&D centers in India.

The major concern arising out of these amendments is increased prices of drugs thus creating problems for the poor. Resolving such a problem would not be easy but other regulatory mechanisms could be put in place to control the drug prices. Indian government can make use of price controls, its bargaining power as a large purchaser, and compulsory licenses in the meantime to ensure that the process does not proceed more quickly than is desirable.

Indian pharmaceutical firms may also suffer with the lack of Indian jobs. This fear is by no means far-fetched, but there are lots of reasons to have a faith that Indian industry would be able to compete with global players. Such as an educated, well-trained scientific workforce that is a backbone of current successful Indian Pharmaceutical industry. Moreover, by passing such reforms that would encourage the development of venture capital, India’s government can make certain that funding will be available for the country’s nascent biotechnology industry, an industry that holds the promise of making significant contributions to India’s economic growth and public health needs.

Taking into account social benefits only is compromising with economic stand. For making the nation strong, the approach should be for socio-economic development.