IP Australia’s 2018 Annual Statistics – a ‘Damning Report Card’ on Australian Patent Filing?

Last week, IP Australia published its Australian Intellectual Property Report 2018 (‘IP Report’).  This annual report is largely a summary of filing numbers and other statistics, along with additional analysis on selected areas in which IP Australia has ongoing research interests.  Last year’s report, for example, looked at Australia’s performance in collaborations between industry and public research institutes based upon the evidence of jointly-filed patent applications.  This theme is continued in the 2018 report, with a chapter reporting on economic analysis indicating that research grants targeting industry/public research collaborations result in better IP outcomes.  Despite this relatively positive news, with its useful insights and analysis, some media outlets have predictably chosen to focus primarily on raw numbers in order to talk down Australia’s efforts.

For example, InnovationAus reporter Stuart Kennedy has called the 2018 IP Report a ‘damning report card on patent filing’ which (Kennedy says) has caused CSIRO chief Larry Marshall to admit that ‘Australia needs to lift its game’.  Kennedy also wrote (somewhat disparagingly, I felt) last week about the fact that Australia’s top patent applicant for 2017 was ‘poker machine king Aristocrat Technologies’, under the headline ‘a shocking punt on patent filings’.

The numbers in the IP Report do indeed tell us that the number one Australian-based applicant for Australian standard patents in 2017 was Aristocrat Technologies Australia, with 157 filings, followed by CSIRO (45), the University of Queensland (18), Bluescope Steel (15) and Monash University (also 15).  But so what?  Aristocrat is a commercial operation, with its own business justifications for seeking patent protection for its innovations, which are no doubt driven by the market in which it operates and its ability to secure a competitive advantage from its patents.  In this context, each individual patent filing may represent a relatively minor innovation, in technical terms, while still making a commercially useful contribution to the overall portfolio. 

Research organisations, such as CSIRO and universities, on the other hand, are expected to invest in substantial and longer-term scientific and technological advances, often at a pre-commercial stage of development.  We would hardly praise them for squandering precious funds on hundreds of individually trivial patent applications, merely for the sake of making their filing numbers look better.

It has to be said, however, that IP Australia does not exactly help the situation in the way it has presented some of the numbers.  It would be very easy (though wrong) to take the following messages away from the patents chapter of the 2018 IP Report (these are all direct quotes, and each appears in the first sentence of a paragraph in the report):

1. ‘While applications grew overall in 2017, applications for standard patents by Australian residents decreased by about five per cent’;
2. ‘Non-resident filings increased by two per cent in 2017 to 26 403, which was 91 per cent of all filings’;
3. ‘World patent filings have been growing strongly since 2010, averaging around eight per cent annual growth to 2016, while Australia's growth has averaged about three per cent over the same period’;
4. ‘Patent grants to Australian residents in 2017 fell by 17 per cent compared to 2016 and now make up just five per cent of the total.’

If this were all there is to the numbers, the description ‘damning report card’ might indeed be apropos.  Fortunately, the situation is not nearly as bad as these figures suggest.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Patent analytics

Australian Appeals Court Upholds Patent ‘Promise Doctrine’, but it’s a Question of What the Inventor ‘Intended to Do’

The Australian Patents Act 1990 requires, in section 18(1)(c) and 18(1A)(c), that an invention must be ‘useful’ in order to be patentable.  This is also commonly known as the requirement for ‘utility’.  Failure to meet this requirement, i.e. inutility, is therefore a ground upon which a patent application may be rejected, or a patent revoked.  One of of the ‘rules’ that has been developed by the courts over the years for assessing utility is an obligation upon an applicant or patentee to satisfy any ‘promise’ that might be made for an invention in the patent specification.  This is sometimes known as the ‘promise doctrine’ – e.g. in Canada, where it was abolished last year by the Supreme Court.  I had been hoping that a Full Bench of the Federal Court of Australia might decide to do likewise, given that the opportunity had arisen.  In a recently-issued decision, however, it has unfortunately declined to do so: ESCO Corporation v Ronneby Road Pty Ltd [2018] FCAFC 46.

On the face of it, a requirement that an invention fulfil any stated promises does not seem unreasonable.  If, for example, an applicant falsely asserts that an invention is worthy of a patent, at least in part because it achieves some valuable improvement over its predecessors, and receives a patent on that basis, then the Patent Office has arguably been misled in its decision to grant the patent.  However, I do not see what this has to do with utility.  The Australian Patents Act 1990 provides a perfectly good mechanism for revoking patents that have been obtained by ‘fraud, false suggestion or misrepresentation’ in section 138(3)(d).  But if an invention is, in fact, useful for some purpose, and the patent specification otherwise meets all of the requirements for a valid patent, then it is difficult to see why the applicant’s choice to include – or not – some ‘promise’ in the specification should make any difference.

The position becomes even more fraught when a specification includes more than one promise.  This aspect of the utility requirement has not previously been conclusively addressed by the Australian courts – i.e. if a patent applicant makes multiple promises for an invention, it is necessary that all of those promises be met by the claims, individually and/or collectively?  The Full Court’s decision in ESCO Corporation has, at least, clarified this situation, with the court deciding that a claimed invention must indeed meet whatever promise(s) have been made for it in the specification.

However, this does not mean that resolving the question of utility is simple in any given case.  The court has explained that whether or not a relevant promise has been made and met must be addressed, by determining whether the invention as claimed does what it is intended by the patentee to do.  This necessarily involves an enquiry into the patentee’s intentions, through consideration of the specification as a whole, including the claims.  It is therefore not simply a matter of identifying some explicit, straightforward, statement in the specification that appears to make one or more ‘promises’ – as the court did (wrongly) at first instance in the ESCO case – and asking whether the claimed invention satisfies all of the stated ‘promises’. 

As a result of conducting the required enquiry, it can become apparent that the invention, as defined in a specific claim, or group of claims, was not intended to satisfy all of the ‘promises’ made in the specification.  In ESCO’s case this was necessarily so, because its application included two groups of claims defining different aspects of the invention (a component, and an assembly including the component, respectively) that might encompass different subsets of the advantages asserted for the invention as a whole.

So while I would have liked to see Australia follow Canada in cutting ties with old UK law and abandoning the ‘promise doctrine’, the Full Court in ESCO Corporation has at least brought some much-needed sense to the Australian law.  Determining whether or not an invention is ‘useful’ is not some formulaic exercise involving the mere comparison of statements in the specification with the subject matter of the claims.  Rather, it is a matter of substance, whereby the intentions of the applicant or patentee are to be determined, at least insofar as they are expressed in the specification as a whole, in relation to each claim, or group of claims.  On the other hand, the decision may not go far enough, in that it is not clear that it necessarily applies to cases in which there are not two or more distinct groups of claims relating to different aspects of an invention.

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Tags: Appeal, Australia, Patent specifications, Utility/usefulness

With Second-Tier Patent Rights in Retreat in Australia, Are They Making an ‘Advancement’ in New Zealand?

While the second-tier innovation patent may be out-of-favour with the Australian government (a late stay of execution notwithstanding), there is at least one New Zealand parliamentarian who is bold enough to stand up for the rights of incremental innovators.  Dr Parmjeet Parmar is a list member for the opposition National Party in New Zealand, who has drafted and submitted a private member’s bill titled the Patents (Advancement Patents) Amendment Bill.  The bill proposes the introduction of a new second-tier patent right which has many similarities with – and a few differences from – the Australian innovation patent, and Dr Parmar suggests that it would fill a gap in the availability of intellectual property rights in New Zealand that was widened by the enactment of the Patents Act 2013.

Generally speaking, the proposed ‘advancement patent’ would – like the innovation patent – provide for a shorter-term patent right, permit fewer claims, and feature a bifurcated system of registration and optional examination and enforceability.  Some of the major differences from the innovation patent would be:

1. terminology, i.e. ‘advancement’ rather than ‘innovation’, and ‘advancement step’ rather than ‘innovative step’;
2. maximum term, i.e. up to ten years, rather than eight years; and
3. lifecycle, i.e. an ‘advancement patent’ would be considered ‘provisional’ initially, and only have the status of ‘granted’ following examination/certification.

Reading Dr Parmar’s maiden speech in the New Zealand parliament, it is not hard to see where she finds her enthusiasm for innovators and innovation.  Born, raised and originally educated in India, she moved to be with her husband in New Zealand where she completed a PhD in biological sciences at the University of Auckland.  She subsequently worked in both academic and commercial science and research, before establishing a business manufacturing natural health products.  Clearly this is a level of hands-on experience with research, innovation, business and entrepreneurialism to which few – if any – of the politicians, bureaucrats and economists currently gunning for the Australian innovation patent can lay claim.

Many people will be surprised to see this new bill introduced in New Zealand at the same time that Australia is looking to abolish the innovation patent.  A common theme in the long gestation of the New Zealand Patents Act 2013 and the recent review of Australia’s IP arrangements by the Productivity Commission was the view, held particularly by certain economists, that for net importers of intellectual property and technology, such as Australia and New Zealand, intellectual property rights tend to be owned predominantly by foreign entities, and that it is therefore not in our interests to grant such rights improvidently, or too easily.

My own analysis of innovation patent data over a nine-year period showed that while the target community of Australian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) were indeed, by filing numbers alone, the dominant users of the system, too many of these were ‘self-filers’, who generally gain no value from their patents, while many of the largest individual users of the system are foreign entities that filed innovation patents for strategic reasons (e.g. Apple, Inc), or merely to take advantage of economic incentives in their own home countries (e.g. many Chinese companies).  While probably not enough to justify abolition – rather than improvement – of the innovation patent, this is not a great look, and is hardly a glowing endorsement of the domestic benefits of a second-tier patent system.

Considering these current concerns with the innovation patent, I decided to take the opportunity to reach out to Dr Parmar and ask her about her motivations for drafting her bill, and why she believes that a New Zealand ‘advancement patent’ would fare better than the Australian innovation patent.  She was kind enough to take the time out of her busy schedule to answer my emailed questions, and I am pleased to be able to present her views in her own words.

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Tags: Innovation patent, Innovation policy, Law reform, New Zealand, Public policy