12 December 2011
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The world of intellectual property is rapidly changing, as we are all starting to see, including on the front pages of our newspapers. In response, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (headed by Australian Francis Gurry) has just released its first World Intellectual Property Report.
The report makes interesting reading for Australian IP owners. Among its key points are:
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- Licensing is growing rapidly. There were an estimated US$180 billion paid in royalties in 2009, up from around US$70 billion just ten years earlier.
- Despite this increase in licensing, only about one in six patent owners license patents to non-affiliated companies.
- Patent pools, which allow users of complex technologies to license a pool of patents owned by different patent owners in one transaction, are on the rise.
- Universities and public research institutes have greatly increased their patent filing activity, up from a base of around zero in 1980 to around six per cent and three per cent respectively of PCT applications in 2009.
- The Asia Pacific region is becoming a major source of patent filings. In 2010, almost 20 per cent of international PCT applications came from Japan, 7.5 per cent from China and six per cent from Korea, or around 1/3 of total PCT filings coming from these three countries. This compares to 27 per cent from the US and 20.5 per cent from major European filers.
- Australia is about mid-range for richer countries in terms of its ‘R&D intensity’. This is recognised to be important for two reasons, the obvious reason being that R&D should lead to new innovations, and also that R&D activity increases the ability of an organisation to absorb new innovations from elsewhere.
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For further information, please contact:
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