Patent Harmonization

Patent Harmonization

Last week I talked about international patents and how it is particularly difficult for both companies and individuals to have their patents enforced and honored the same way around the world. I want to thank Sam for bringing the idea of patent harmonization to my attention because patent harmonization is an important part of international patenting that I should have mentioned but never came across in my research.

To reiterate what I talked about last week, one of the major problems with patents nowadays is how international patents are handled. Because each country has differing patent policies, regulations, enforcement, and judicial systems, it is makes filing a patent extremely difficult because rules are not consistent throughout the world. Factors like eligibility, industrial applicability (what is considered "useful"), previous inventions, novelty, obviousness, and frame-of-reference contribute to the differences in patentability throughout the world.

In order to address this, patent harmonization attempts to unify patent laws through treaties and policy agreements. One of the first efforts of patent harmonization was the Paris Convention of 1884 which every industrialized nation except of Taiwan signed. The treaty "allows an inventor in a signatory country to file an application in his or her home country first and then file corresponding applications within one year in any other signatory country." The filing date in of the patent in another country must the first filing date in the home country. This gives time to inventors to ensure that they have the opportunity to file for patents in other countries in a timely manner. Another important treaty was the Patent Cooperation Treaty which directly dealt with the patent prosecutions and laid out standards for prosecution procedures. The significance was that enforcement of patent laws were a step closer to be uniform throughout. Other patent harmonization efforts in history included the World Trade Organization's Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, General Agreements on Tariff and Trade (GATT) patent agreements, North American Free Trade Agreement, and more recently, the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999. The European Union has also created several of their own policies as well as has formed the European Patent Office.

I think that patent harmonization is an invaluable aspect of our patent system today. Our world is becoming increasingly connected, and each year international relationships grow even further. So with the growing number of innovations each year, it is critical that we form a unified patenting system so that people around the world will continue to be motivated to invent new things. What do you think of patent harmonization? Are they any disadvantages?

Source article: http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/mdd/v04/i01/html/patents.html