Francis Gurry, deputy director general of WIPO, says that the rapid growth in PCT applications from north-east Asia will create linguistic challenges for the rest of the world, which has grown used to technology produced in European languages.
PCT applications from China and South Korea rose sharply in 2006, according to the latest figures from WIPO.
Applicants from China filed 3,910 PCT applications last year, an increase of 56.8% over 2005.
South Korea also saw a large increase, with applications rising by more than 25% to 5,935. Across the board, PCT applications rose 6.4% in 2006 over the previous year.
"Innovation has been traditionally dominated by Europe and North America. New centres of innovation – in particular in north-east Asia – are emerging and this is transforming both the geography of the patent system and of future global economic growth," said Gurry.
Gurry told MIP Week that the rise in applications from Asia presents major challenges for patent offices and for companies in the West – which have traditionally been responsible for most of the world's patenting.
"Patent offices, which are trying to do an adequate prior art search, are increasingly faced with prior art in much greater linguistic diversity," he said. "This is a situation that is emerging very rapidly."
"Secondly, one of the main functions of the patent system is to disclose technology. [One of the challenges of the rise of applications from Asia] will be on companies' capacities to operate in this new world in which increasing volumes of technology is being produced in non-European languages."
At the moment, English language summaries of all PCT applications are available. But WIPO is developing a terminology database that will allow applicants to search PCT applications for particular words in other languages. Gurry said he expected the new system to launch during 2007.
WIPO is also working on a proposal to allow PCT applicants to pay for a supplementary PCT search performed by another IP office.
This would mean that an applicant from Europe, for example, would be able to request the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office to perform a search, in addition to that carried out by the EPO.
Gurry said that initial disagreement about the proposal between two of the biggest IP offices – the USPTO and the EPO – over the timing of requests for a supplementary search, now look to have been resolved. The EPO had argued that an applicant should be able to make a request at any time during the application process. The USPTO said that the applicant should only be able to request a supplementary search once the main search results had been delivered.
Now they look likely to accept a compromise deal in which applicants would be able to request a supplementary search 17 months after the priority date. Despite opposition from the JPO and the Spanish IP office, other key IP offices are set to agree the proposal at a PCT working group meeting in April. If it is backed by the WIPO General Assembly in September, the new scheme, which IP offices will be able to join on a voluntary basis, could come into force in 2008.
The latest WIPO statistics also reveal that there were 145,300 PCT applications in 2006, of which the US made 49,555, making it the biggest filer. Following the US were Japan, Germany, South Korea, France, Britain, the Netherlands and China.
The February edition of Managing Intellectual Property looks at the companies from China, South Korea and India that are filing most actively overseas. This includes an analysis of PCT publications over the last five years.
