Thursday Shorts
CHINA PUBLISHES AMBITIONS "NATIONAL PATENT STRATEGY" FOR NEXT DECADE: If you thought China's ascendance in the patent world was impressive over the last ten years, wait 'till you see the next ten, according to a recently published government document. In 2009, China received about 300K applications for utility patents (the USPTO received about 480K applications in the same time). The Chinese government now wants to blow that number up to 1 million by 2015. During the same time, China intends to roughly double its number of patent examiners, to 9,000 (the USPTO has about 6.3K examiners). After viewing the 5 and 10 year numbers, Director Kappos reportedly referred to the targets as “mind-blowing numbers.”
To lift its patent count, China has introduced an array of incentives including cash bonuses, better housing for individual filers and tax breaks for companies that are prolific patent producers. Even at its current pace, China is expected to overtake US patent filings by 2012.
See NYT, "When Innovation, Too, Is Made in China" (link)
See also
IAM Blog, "China's national patent strategy poses challenges for policy makers and businesses alike" (link)
The Intangible Economy, "China's new patent strategy" (link)
JAPAN LOOKING TO SLASH PATENT FEES IN HALF: The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to cut the corporate tax rate for foreign firms as part of measures to attract more business. The METI is also studying allowing individuals to defer payment of income taxes on equity warrants issued by overseas parent companies as well as cutting patent-related fees by half (link).
USPTO FUNDING ISSUES CONTINUE: At the end of 2010, a temporary funding bill was approved keeping the government running through March 4 2011 at 2010 funding levels. The problem is that the temporary bill does not take into account the PTO's 15% hike on fees and the agency's ability to have full access to its fees. The PTO asked for $2.322 billion for 2011 (up from $2.016B in 2010), but will have to wait until April to receive further funding. The IPO has estimated that this glitch will likely end up costing the USPTO $200M. For more, see here (link).
Posts
China's rapid ascendancy in IP (especially patents) shows that the US outsourcing trend has come back to bite us. It seems many US companies that decided to save a few dollars by outsourcing ended up shooting themselves in the foot -- by outsourcing, they armed foreign companies with the knowledge and skills to become their own biggest marketplace competitors. In this sense, the decision to outsource too often seems to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. I certainly hope that one day corporate executives will wake up to the scourge of foreign IP theft and realize that some of their outsourcing decisions harm not only American workers, but also themselves.
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