Top IP offices struggle to cooperate

01 May 2010

A meeting of the world’s five biggest patent offices in China last month saw little progress on work sharing. Peter Ollier outlines the barriers to greater cooperation and explains why the issue is so important to IP owners

In speeches in the US and Hong Kong this month USPTO director David Kappos referred to intellectual property as "the currency of innovation" and stressed its increasing importance to countries as differences in the cost of labour diminish. He spoke of the seriousness of the USPTO's patent backlog problem and added that "we cannot afford any longer to focus the vast majority of our efforts on quibbling over inadequately harmonised laws".

But beneath the rhetoric, efforts to increase worksharing between the five major patent offices (USPTO, KIPO, EPO, JPO and SIPO – known as the IP5), enhance the PCT system and increase use of patent prosecution highways (PPHs) remain very slow and there are still serious differences in approach among the offices.

The second meeting of the IP5 in Guilin, China on April 15 and 16 appears to have resulted in limited progress. In a statement, officials merely said the group...

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