Posts Tagged: "WIPO"

U.S. Government officials have congratulated Daren Tang on his nomination as WIPO Director General. As reported by IPWatchdog yesterday, Tang was nominated to the post by the WIPO Coordination Committee at a vote in Geneva. The nomination is expected to be confirmed by the WIPO General Assembly when it meets on May 7-8, 2020. Tang will then succeed Francis Gurry on October 1, 2020. According to reports from Geneva, Tang won after two rounds of voting. He led the first round with 37 votes out of the 83 members of the Coordination Committee, with the Chinese candidate, Wang Binying, in second place with 19. Tang then secured a clear victory in the second round, with 55 votes to Wang’s 28.

Daren Tang has been elected to be the next WIPO Director General, succeeding Francis Gurry. Tang is currently the Chief Executive of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS). He has served in this capacity since 2015. Prior to that he was Deputy Chief Executive and Chief Legal Counsel for IPOS and Senior State Counsel, International Affairs Division at the Singapore Attorney-General’s Chambers. He also has served as Chairperson for WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights.

Twenty-two member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), more than 100 organizations, and over 100 individuals have submitted comments and suggestions in response to WIPO’s Draft Issues Paper on IP Policy and AI. The submissions have been posted in the form and in the languages in which they were received on WIPO’s website. The comments will feed into a revised issues paper for discussion at the second session of the WIPO Conversation on IP and AI, which takes place in Geneva in May 2020.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Copyright Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held a joint event titled, “Copyright in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (AI) at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The event explored how global copyright law and intellectual property law, as well as broader policy, may currently address AI technology, and included dialogue about changes that may be needed. Panelists also shared how AI is being utilized now and what future technology deployment and innovation may look like. The event was part of a series of conversations organized by the U.S, Copyright Office and WIPO both in the United States and Europe, with the next conversation scheduled for May 11 and 12 in Geneva, Switzerland. The summit illustrated that AI presents unique opportunities for innovation, assuming intellectual property rights are respected, but questions remain in several areas, including whether machine learning is producing “original” work and whether the product of such software is inherently reproductive, derivative or the result of a system or process devoid of human action.

Dr. Marco Alemán  is one of 10 candidates to succeed Francis Gurry as Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The WIPO Coordination Committee will nominate one candidate on March 5 and 6, before he or she is formally appointed by the WIPO General Assembly. Alemán currently holds the post of Director of the Patent Law Division. After acting as Director of the Colombian Industrial Property Office, he started his career in 1999 at WIPO as Principal Administrator of Cooperation Programs for the Development for Latin America and the Caribbean, then as Deputy Director of the Division of Public Policy and Development, and later as Deputy Director of the Patent Law Division.

Last night, February 4, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) held a reception to launch its eighth annual International IP Index, Art of the Possible. The event featured remarks from U.S. Patent and Trademarks Director Andrei Iancu, who touted the results as a win overall for the United States in particular, as well as for the global economy, but also explained to attendees that the upcoming WIPO elections for Director General will be key in signaling to the global community that respect for IP protections and enforcement is paramount to economic development. While Iancu stopped short of endorsing any of the ten candidates the WIPO General Assembly is considering, he said the next Director General must come from a country and respects intellectual property rights. Read his remarks in full below.

In the increasingly global environment, our creators, inventors and innovators have continued to lean on the shoulders of the of intellectual property (IP) system as the core of the emergent global knowledge economy and a guarantee for private reward and public welfare. The products of intellect have continued to face opportunities and challenges presented by rapid technological changes. With the…

There are 10 candidates declared to succeed Francis Gurry as WIPO Director General, when he retires in September this year after serving two six-year terms. One of them will be nominated to be Director General by the WIPO Coordination Committee on March 5 and 6, before being formally appointed by the WIPO General Assembly. The Coordination Committee comprises 83 of WIPO’s 192 member states. The 10 candidates include eight men and two women. There are three candidates from Asia, three from Latin America, two from Africa, and one each from Europe and central Asia. There are no candidates from North America.

A patent maintenance fee is an official fee that is payable at prescribed intervals to a national patent office over the lifecycle of a patent application or a granted patent, in order to keep the patent application or the granted patent in force in that particular jurisdiction. It is payable by an applicant or a patent owner (an assignee or a patentee, as the case may be). Patent maintenance fees are an integral part of the patenting process and may also be referred to as patent annuities, patent annuity fees, patent renewal fees, or patent annual fees. The failure to pay a patent maintenance fee could have serious and far-reaching consequences, including the patent application or the granted patent being treated as lapsed, withdrawn, or abandoned in that particular jurisdiction. In this article, we will delve into the patent maintenance fees in the jurisdictions in which the payment of said fees begins at the patent grant stage or patent issue stage, or are calculated from the date on which a patent is issued or granted.

In 2019, the first-ever United States-India collaboration on intellectual property rights (IPR) education was launched. Program participants included entrepreneurs, students, and academic faculty. The initiative brought together multiple governments and agencies for a blending of ideas and priorities that elevated the experience for participants and advanced U.S.-India relations. The outcome was a sense of U.S.-India ‘team’ in collaboration to advance the cause of intellectual property education in India. The United States Consulate General Kolkata, India funded the creation of an IPR education initiative that included a series of webinars and a week-long series of summer workshops presented as the first United States-India Symposium on Intellectual Property Rights. Workshops focused on the value, importance, and use of IPR as a driver of economic success. The program was promoted within the practitioner, academic, and business community through email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media including distribution channels of the local partners.

Innovative activity is more collaborative and transnational, but also focused on a few large clusters in a few countries. These are among the findings in the latest World Intellectual Property Report, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on November 12. The report focuses on the geography of innovation, using geocoding based on the addresses of inventors listed on patents and the locations of the authors of scientific articles and conference proceedings. The report found that, during the period 2015-2017, some 30 metropolitan hotspots accounted for more than two-thirds of all patents and nearly half of scientific activity. The top 10 hotspots worldwide are: San Francisco/San Jose, New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Boston, Shanghai, London, Beijing, Bengaluru and Paris. In the U.S., hotspots around New York, San Francisco and Boston accounted for about a quarter of all U.S. patents filed from 2011 to 2015.

Each year the World Intellectual Property Organization releases a report titled World Intellectual Property Indicators. The latest edition of the report, the 2019 version, is a look back on the filing statistics for 2018. The report is eye-opening and should be mandatory reading for policy makers and legislators in the United States. For the first time since 2009, the United States saw a decline in the number of patent applications filed. This remarkable statistic comes at a time when patent applications are growing in number across the rest of the world. And let’s not forget that 2009 was a time of particular economic crisis both in the United States and around the world due to the global financial crisis and Wall Street meltdown brought on by the housing market collapse.  

While online giant Amazon has been in the news recently for asking the Federal Aviation Administration to ease restrictions for its planned drone-based delivery services, a battle is raging behind the scenes for the future of unmanned delivery vehicles. Walmart is combating the narrative of online retailers overtaking brick-and-mortar businesses by revamping its image and services. Besides using a hybrid of online shopping and manual pick-up at the store, the company is very interested in delivering its products to the customer directly—not only through traditional means, but with unmanned drone delivery couriers.

With exponential growth in patent filings each year and expanding company portfolios, Patent Quality Assessment (PQA) has become a significant and crucial task. USPTO maintenance fees, which are required to be paid periodically to keep a patent alive for 20 years, further add to the importance of maintaining only quality patents. Patent professionals worldwide have developed a myriad of metrics to assess the quality of patent assets. Benchmarking tools include terms like “Qscore” and “Asset indexes” to quantify the qualitative attributes of a patent.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: WIPO launches dispute resolution service for Chinese domain names; Morrison Foerster report shows that IP litigation costs are increasing as the number of IP matters being handled are decreasing; the Federal Circuit issues precedential decisions upholding claim construction findings at the ITC and overturning a district court jury verdict finding invalidity for being unsupported by record evidence; the Second Circuit clarifies when profits can be awarded in trademark cases; Uber IP transfer creates $6.1 billion tax break for the company; major football associations call for crackdown on Saudi piracy service; OPPO inks patent agreements with Intel and Ericsson; and Broadcom acquires Symantec’s enterprise security business.