IP in the press

Published: 5 July 2010
By: Peter Prowse

The following media coverage report on the latest IP news stories is from the June 2010 issue of the CIPA Journal.

With the election out of the way, at least a few members of the third estate have gone back to their original jobs of keeping the public informed about the economy, science and business – which means that the Second Annual CIPA IP Debate on 24 May enjoyed an unprecedented level of media interest. (Being generous, it might have had something to do with having The Royal Society as a partner and Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston FRS as a speaker – but the event was definitely CIPA’s idea). Sir John is not backward at coming forward, especially when he is able to aim his criticisms of the IP system at his old sparring partner, Dr Craig Venter. On the day after the Royal Society event, Sir John got his attack in early – before some of us had even started breakfast – with an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

Synthetic life forms ‘pretty but insignificant’
The Nobel prize-winning scientist John Sulston says it would be ‘extremely damaging’ if Dr Craig Venter is allowed to patent artificially created life forms. He outlines his concerns…

CIPA mustered its retaliatory forces with uncommon dispatch and had Biotech Committee luminary Dr Gordon Wright being interviewed by the BBC science correspondent Palab Ghosh before the howls of indignation had stopped echoing round Tunbridge Wells (appropriately, the BBC does have a studio there). Gordon did a three-way interview (with Sir John located, we assume, safely back in Manchester) which was broadcast on the BBC World Service later that day. He followed it up with a lengthy press interview with Boonsri Dickinson, of Smart Planet, who wrote an equally lengthy article, published on 28 May, of which the following is but a tiny extract:

Will patents give Craig Venter a monopoly over synthetic life?
The first patent application relates to inserting a synthetic genome in a cell, says patent attorney Gordon Wright at Elkington and Fife LLP. ‘It is fantastically broad. It is not restricted to cell type and it is not restricted to the size of the genome. And it applies to prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms,’ Wright says.
Furthermore, it would be ‘mind-boggling’ if it were allowed, but it won’t be, says Wright. The whole patent process is transparent, he adds.
     Wright explains that ‘the two families are based on WO 2008/024129, Synthetic Genomes and WO 2008/016380, Installation of Genomes or Partial Genomes into Cells or Cell-like Systems. Neither of these two patent applications has yet been granted by either of the USPTO or the European Patent Office (EPO). Examination is, however, underway. The process is entirely open to public inspection.

Patent attorneys should be grateful to Sir John Sulston for his media skills: his comments at the Second Annual CIPA IP Debate not only made the BBC, most of the UK national newspapers and the scientific journals, but was also picked up by international news agencies and republished around the world.
     At the suggestion of CIPA President Alasdair Poore, the possibility is being explored of holding another debate on science and IP later in the year, probably in Manchester.
     News of the aftermath of the election continues to trickle out of Whitehall, with some rather curious upstaging going on. According to The Pharma Letter on 1 June, it was the Prime Minister himself who announced a new fast-track patent application procedure:

UK to fast-track international patent applications
A new fast-track procedure for approving international patent applications that will cut waiting times by more than a year was launched in the UK last Friday. Prime Minister David Cameron announced the new Intellectual Property Office (IPO) scheme during his speech in Leeds, which set out his vision for transforming the UK economy.
     Intellectual Property Minister Baroness Wilcox welcomed the announcement, saying: ‘Innovation is one of the main driving forces for Britain’s economic recovery. Delays in dealing with patent applications prevent firms from expanding and creating new jobs. It is essential that businesses can take ideas from the drawing board to the market as quickly as possible. Securing a patent is an integral part of that process. The new fast-track procedure will make it quicker for business to turn innovation and ideas into products and jobs. Britain is leading the way in identifying and dealing with the patent backlog. I hope other countries will establish similar fast-track schemes to tackle this problem.’

General hurrahs for Baroness Wilcox for welcoming it, but raised eyebrows: seasoned Whitehall-watchers would normally have expected her, as the recently appointed Minister for IP, to be the one making the announcement. Her appointment (unlike her government colleague David Laws’ resignation) seems to have largely gone unreported by the mainstream media, with the music press taking the keenest interest. Robert Ashton told Music Week on 25 May that:

Business secretary Vince Cable has given Baroness Wilcox the brief to handle Intellectual Property, including overseeing the Intellectual Property Office.
     Wilcox will cover all the business of the Department for Business Innovation and Skills in the House of Lords in addition to her new role.
     The IP role was handled under the previous Government by David Lammy, who also attended to higher education. That part of his brief will now to taken on by minister for universities and science David Willetts.

David Willetts’ appointment as the new government’s science minister, did, however, generate many favourable comments in the media, including this, from Steve Connor in The Independent on 24 May:

Has science found a friend in Willetts?
Conservative MP David Willetts is the new science minister, and from what little I’ve seen of him so far, scientists should be pleased. Although he graciously concedes that he is not someone who knows a lot about science, it is clear that he is mightily impressed with it as both an intellectual pursuit and as a means of revitalising the economy.

Unlike the Baroness, John Mitchell (known throughout the patent profession for his very public spat with IBM over voice-recognition technology) does not see ‘securing a patent as an integral part’ of getting a product to the market place, and The Guardian published his letter to that effect on 4 June:

I was intrigued to hear the prime minister announce that the UK Intellectual Property Office is to introduce a ‘fast-track’ scheme to tackle the backlog of patent applications, which ‘costs the global economy an estimated £7.6bn a year’. Sadly this seems to be an early example of the new government announcing measures that will not actually do much to assist innovation, as the UK loses billions instead to patent infringement each year.
     […] The expensive court process prevents SMEs taking enforcement action, thus assisting corporate infringement - a point the Gowers report confirmed in 2006. Meantime the UKIPO continues to mis-sell patents as offering protection.
     Unless patent enforcement is radically improved first, there seems little point in announcing an acceleration in granting patents as an economic measure. Employing patent examiners in the meantime is a good example of wasted public expenditure, unless government’s aim is to assist corporates only. Those SMEs that create innovation await even the courtesy of a response to multiple requests for a meeting with leaders of the new government.
John Mitchell, Chairman, SME Innovation Alliance

Inner calm and contemplative mediation, rather than speed, are presumably what the Indian government had in mind when it announced that it was planning to ‘patent nearly a thousand yoga postures’, as reported on the BBC Today programme on 9 June:

The Indian government is planning to patent nearly a thousand yoga postures. Yoga teacher Swami Pragyamurti and Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, debate whether yoga moves should be patented and how that could be enforced.
     Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta says the practice will mean ‘the right to deny others to practice unless you take the consent’ of the patent holder.
     But Swami Pragyamurti is concerned about ‘the whole idea of trying to patent something as universal as yoga’.

CIPA did contact the BBC before the programme was broadcast, offering to provide an expert spokesman who could explain what the patent system is actually designed to do, and what it does not apply to, but our offer was declined. The way the story was reported in The Guardian the previous day was rather more accurate:

Yoga heritage: don’t even think about stealing it, says Indian government
An Indian government body tasked with protecting the country’s rich heritage of medicinal and medical philosophy and practice has started filming hundreds of asanas – yoga poses – in an attempt to make a rigid system out of this most flexible of meditative practices.
     The ‘videographs’ are intended to provide irrefutable evidence for anyone hoping to patent a new style of yoga that the Indians got there first.
     Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who heads the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, a Delhi-based government organisation set up jointly by the ministries of health and science, told The Guardian: ‘Simple text isn’t adequate. People are claiming they are doing something different from the original yoga when they are not.’
     ‘There is no intention to stop people practising yoga but nobody should misappropriate yoga and start charging franchise money,’ said Gupta, who, like many Delhi residents, practises the ancient art in a park near his home.
‘Yoga is there for all humanity. It is for serving people,’ the guru said. ‘It is traditional wisdom and its reach should never be limited’.

That other Asian champion of IP rights, China, seems to attribute its successes in innovation and economic growth to its 30-year old membership of WIPO. The People’s Daily Online reported on June 9 that:

Patents soar during 30 years of WIPO membership
June 3 marked the 30th anniversary of China’s membership in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
     Since that day the country’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) has grown into the world’s fifth-most prolific source of international Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patents. Last year 7,946 PCT patents from China were filed, during a year when the number of PCT applications declined worldwide for the first time due to global economic turmoil.
     While its international intellectual property registrations have increased, applications and granted patents in China itself have soared. By April this year, nearly 6.1 million patent applications had been filed since the nation resumed issuing patents in 1985, about 2 million of which were applications to protect inventions. About 3.37 million patents have been granted.
     Accession to WIPO has helped healthy and rapid development of intellectual property work in China and is another aspect of the nation’s crucial role in the world economy, said industry insiders.

Back here in debt-burdened Europe, the specialist IT press appeared to welcome a couple of proclamations that seem to make life more straightforward for European companies – and to get rid of an obstacle that only serves to ‘enrich IP lawyers’. (A scandalous accusation – anybody feel like handing some of their spare cash over to a good libel lawyer?). Andrew Charlesworth wrote in Computing on 14 May:

Europe clarifies its position on intellectual property
The European Patent Office and the Commissioner for innovation appear to be dancing in sync. Its ruling stated that software can only be granted a patent on the grounds of its technical merit - a statement that reinforces the most recent decisions of the EPO Intellectual property is rightly seen a key competitive tool by businesses and politicians alike. This is why two pronouncements this week from Europe on the subject of patents matter so much.
     ‘To be granted a patent, a program must provide a technical solution to a technical problem,’ said Mark Kenrick, partner at intellectual property firm Marks & Clerk LLP. ‘That means a business method cannot be patented, but a clever way of implementing a business method on a computer can.’
     Which brings us to the second pronouncement from Europe this week on patents. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European commissioner for research, innovation and science, made a commitment to unify Europe’s disparate patent regime, which is often seen by innovative companies as an obstacle to business that only serves to enrich IP lawyers.
Geoghegan-Quinn, fully aware that the EC has a reputation for being long on strategy and short on actions, has promised the Innovation Strategy will contain an action plan and not just a list of promises.
     The opinion handed down by the Enlarged Board to stand by the EPO’s most recent decisions is likely to help her cause to that end. One could suspect they may even have conferred.

And finally, back here in the UK, CIPA came up with a convincing response to Katie Taylor, a freelance journalist who had been asked by the editor of the Financial Mail on Sunday to come up with a piece that showed – with a real-life example – that patents and patent attorneys are vital to the bright ideas and business start-ups that are vital to economic growth. Here’s what the paper published on 16 May:

Here’s a bright idea, visit a patent office before you go public, by Katie Taylor
There is at least one thing the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats can definitely agree on - bright ideas and business start-ups will be vital to economic growth. Pledges of support for enterprise featured in both their manifestos, including access to business mentors and loans, and a focus on green technology start-ups.
     Professor Guido Cozzi of Durham Business School says: ‘Our patent laws are satisfactory, but the real weakness lies in the protection of ideas before they receive a patent’.
     ‘A surprising number of people tell everyone about their big idea and then find it is too late to apply for a patent,’ says Andrea Brewster, a partner with law firm Greaves Brewster, based in Cheddar, Somerset. ‘Applying for a patent is crucial, but first you need to establish your product is commercially viable. If in the course of your research you have to discuss your idea with others, you should use a nondisclosure confidentiality agreement.’
     Saban Demirbasa made sure his bright idea was protected. After losing his fourth mobile phone he came up with an idea that meant he would never lose another.
     The i-migo™ is a wireless digital key that backs up valuable data from a mobile phone and triggers an alarm when it is separated from the phone by more than 20 yards. ‘The idea was simple, but as I’m not a technical expert, I needed help from those who were to make it work,’ says Saban, 41, from Dulwich, south-east London. ‘I knew the idea was vulnerable, so I had non-disclosure agreements with companies I dealt with and hired an attorney to help with the patent application.’ Patents have been granted for i-migo in Britain, the US and China. A launch is planned for October.