Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of diagrams and tables
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Patent offices and the global governance of knowledge
- 2 Labyrinths and catacombs: Patent office procedure
- 3 The rise of patent offices
- 4 The Sun and its planets: The European Patent Office and national offices
- 5 The USPTO and JPO
- 6 The age of Trilaterals and the spirit of cooperation
- 7 The jewel in the crown: India's Patent Office
- 8 The dragon and the tiger: China and South Korea
- 9 Joining the patent office conga line: Brazil
- 10 Islands and regions in the patent stream
- 11 Reclaiming the patent social contract
- 12 Patent administration sovereignty: Nodal solutions for small countries, developing countries
- Index
- References
12 - Patent administration sovereignty: Nodal solutions for small countries, developing countries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of diagrams and tables
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Patent offices and the global governance of knowledge
- 2 Labyrinths and catacombs: Patent office procedure
- 3 The rise of patent offices
- 4 The Sun and its planets: The European Patent Office and national offices
- 5 The USPTO and JPO
- 6 The age of Trilaterals and the spirit of cooperation
- 7 The jewel in the crown: India's Patent Office
- 8 The dragon and the tiger: China and South Korea
- 9 Joining the patent office conga line: Brazil
- 10 Islands and regions in the patent stream
- 11 Reclaiming the patent social contract
- 12 Patent administration sovereignty: Nodal solutions for small countries, developing countries
- Index
- References
Summary
Sovereignty matters
Formally at least, patent administration remains an area of state sovereignty. State sovereignty has been eroded over patent standards, where through multilateral, regional and bilateral trade agreements, many states, most of them developing countries, have moved up to ‘international’ standards that really are the standards of the US and EU. Even though states largely retain discretion over how to administer a patent system, we have seen that the patent offices of many developing countries are becoming integrated into a system of global governance led by the Trilateral Offices.
The integration of developing-country patent offices into this global governance structure is not necessarily consistent with their national interests. It is not immediately obvious, for example, that a developing country which imports medicines should follow the pharmaceutical examination standards of developed-country patent offices that are prepared to accept the gaming behaviour of patent attorneys in the drafting of patent claims. By doing so a developing country is simply importing that gaming behaviour. It is changing the selection pressures that operate in its markets. We have seen that India and Brazil have taken steps to avoid the quality problems that exist in this area at least. In India, the Indian Patents Act allows the examiner to come to a different view of the patentability of a pharmaceutical product (see Chapter 7), and in Brazil the outcome may be different because the Brazilian pharmaceutical regulatory authority has the power to overturn the Brazilian patent examiner's decision in the case of pharmaceutical patents.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Global Governance of KnowledgePatent Offices and their Clients, pp. 318 - 340Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010