Latest WIPO Draft Shows Options For Work Programme On Patents

The latest text on future work at the World Intellectual Property Organization Standing Committee on the Law of Patents is available here [pdf]. The draft emerged this evening.

Future work was slated to be the most difficult part of the committee being held from 25-29 January (IPW, WIPO, 27 January), and has proved to be so as the SCP spent the majority of today in informal and regional group discussions, and appears likely to do the same tomorrow.

The latest working draft, which features suggestions from the “Asian Like-Minded Countries” indicates some differences in the way aspects of the committee’s work are being interpreted. For example, an earlier draft called for a study on “transfer of technology, focusing on how the patent system supports innovation and technology transfer.”

The latest draft says the study should focus on “how the patent system impedes technology transfer” and suggests an additional independent expert commission on “existing challenges to effective transfer of technology.”

The draft also suggests new studies on the issue of “IP misuse in standardization” and on “patents and public health.” And it addresses limitations and exceptions, client-attorney privileges and patent quality as well as a possible follow-up in 2011 to last year’s conference on public policy (IPW, WIPO, 15 July 2009).