Funding Quantum Hardware, Forsaking Research Talent: The Deepening Crisis in Australian Science

It has been just over two years since the Australian and Queensland governments announced their near-billion-dollar joint venture to fund PsiQuantum. Back in April 2024, policymakers excitedly pitched the construction of a utility-scale quantum computer at Brisbane Airport as an ‘anchor’ for the next industrial revolution. I did not write about it then.  Like many, I assumed the inevitable collision with technical and logistical reality would happen quietly, behind closed doors, perhaps eventually leading to a scaled-back scope or an extended timeline.

But here we are in mid-2026, and the wheels are visibly wobbling.  Last month, the much-touted Brisbane Airport site was unceremoniously abandoned in favour of a council-owned site at Moreton Bay Central.  Yet, despite pivoting to an empty lot at a former paper mill, it appears that neither the company nor the government has publicly walked back their foundational commitment to have the site operational by the end of 2027.  Promising to build the world's first million-qubit, fault-tolerant computer from the ground up in just 18 months is, to put it mildly, an ambitious logistical – and technical –  undertaking!

More importantly, I am writing about this now because we should not continue to ignore the sheer opportunity cost of this mega-project.  While the government plays venture capitalist with a single, highly speculative hardware gamble, the reality is that Australian science may be reaching a breaking point.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australia’s Gross Expenditure on R&D (GERD) was a mere 1.69% of GDP in 2023-24.  This leaves us languishing far behind the OECD average, estimated at 2.93% in 2023, and significantly outpaced by peer economies that treat foundational research as critical infrastructure rather than a discretionary expense.

We are, quite literally, starving the ecosystem.

There is a profound irony at the heart of the PsiQuantum deal.  The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley, but its co-founders are products of the Australian university system.  They are the quintessential example of the ‘brain drain’ – talented innovators who left Australia when the domestic funding ecosystem failed to support their ambition.  This leaves us spending nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money to effectively buy back our own exported talent at a massive premium.

Yet, in doing so, we are contributing to the collapse of the very STEM pipeline required to produce the next generation of innovators.  How does a government justify a near-billion-dollar bet on a speculative hardware project while simultaneously starving the foundation?  The answer, as is so often the case in technology policy, lies in a deliberate semantic conflation.  By using the word ‘quantum’ as a monolithic buzzword, policymakers have successfully blurred the lines between practical, deployable technologies and a long-term engineering marathon.

Let's dive in and look at the data.

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Tags: Australia, Funding, Government programs, Innovation policy, Manufacturing, Politics, Public policy, Quantum technology

Intellectual Property is Integral to AI Regulation, and Getting it Wrong Will Hand More Power to Big Tech

Governments around the world are considering how they can – and should – regulate the development and deployment of increasingly powerful and disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.  Australia is no exception.  On 1 June 2023, the Australian government announced the release of two papers intended to help ‘ensure the growth of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) in Australia is safe and responsible’.  The first of these is the Rapid Response Report: Generative AI, which was commissioned by Australia’s National Science and Technology Council at the request of the Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic, back in February.  The Rapid Response Report assesses potential risks and opportunities in relation to AI, and is intended to provide a scientific basis for discussions about the way forward.  The second paper is the Safe and Responsible AI in Australia Discussion Paper which, according to the Minister’s media release, ‘canvasses existing regulatory and governance responses in Australia and overseas, identifies potential gaps and proposes several options to strengthen the framework governing the safe and responsible use of AI.’

The discussion paper seeks feedback on how Australia can address the potential risks of AI.  It provides an overview of existing domestic and international AI governance and regulation, and identifies potential gaps and additional mechanisms – including regulations, standards, tools, frameworks, principles and business practices – to support the development and adoption of AI.  It focuses on ensuring AI is used safely and responsibly, but does not consider all issues related to AI, such as the implications of AI on the labour market and skills, national security, or military specific AI uses.

Another key area that is expressly excluded from this consultation is intellectual property.  That is, in my view, a serious shortcoming.  It appears to presume that IP is somehow separable from the other issues covered by the discussion paper.  This is a flawed presumption, particularly in relation to business practices.  In the contemporary world, IP is at the heart of many business practices, and the laws and regulations that we make around IP can be the difference between a business practice that is viable, and one that is untenable.  And not every business practice that might be enabled by IP laws is necessarily desirable or of net benefit to society.  If we fail to consider the interplay between IP laws, business practices, and other forms of regulation, then we risk making mistakes that might prove very difficult to undo in the future.

This article is prompted by, but is not primarily about, the Australian consultation process (although I will return to that at the end).  It is about how IP rights, and other forms of regulation, could operate to concentrate increasing levels of power in the hands of the few big tech companies – such as Microsoft (through its partnership with OpenAI), Google and Amazon – that have risen in recent years as the dominant players in AI and its enabling technologies.  Based on recent developments, I believe that the stage is already being set for implementation of exactly the kinds of laws and regulations that would most benefit these companies, under the guise of protecting innovators, content creators, and the general public against the various threats said to be presented by AI.

A perfect storm is brewing.  Onerous regulation around the development, training and deployment of AI systems could combine with IP-based restraints on the use of training data, and on AI outputs, to bake-in an advantage for the world’s richest and best-resourced companies.  The storm is being fuelled by hype and fearmongering which, even though much of it may be well-intentioned, plays to the interests of big tech. 

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Tags: Artificial intelligence, Australia, Copyright, Innovation policy, Machine learning, Patent law, Public consultation, Public policy

Eligibility of Computer-Implemented Inventions Behind Unprecedented Numbers of Patent Office Rulings

Once upon a time – not so very long ago, in fact – it was rare for the Australian Patent Office to issue a formal published ruling on the patent-eligibility of claims submitted for examination.  Indeed, ex parte decisions (i.e. those involving only the applicant and the Office) were generally in the minority, and most of those related to pharmaceutical extensions of patent term, allowability of amendments, and extensions of time to meet various deadlines.  Historically, the overwhelming majority of decisions have related to inter partes proceedings, such as patent oppositions.  That is, however, no longer true.  Following a peak in 2015, inter partes decisions have been falling, while ex parte decisions have been generally on the rise since 2011.  In 2021, ex parte decisions outnumbered inter partes decisions for the first time.  And in 2022 more ex parte decisions have been issued so far (i.e. up until the end of July) than in any past full year, with inter partes decisions once again lagging behind.

The sole driver of the growth in ex parte decisions has been patent-eligibility according to the ‘manner of manufacture’ test under Australian patent law.  The number of published Patent Office decisions relating to subject-matter eligibility of patent claims has risen from fewer than one per year in the 2000-2009 decade to 19 decisions in 2021 and 21 decisions in just the first seven months of 2022.  Since 2010 there have been 115 published decisions on eligibility, with the claims at issue being found ineligible in 100 of those cases.  Almost all of these have related to computer-implemented inventions.

The issue here is not that some subject matter is ineligible for patent protection.  That has always been, and will always be, true.  But the massive increase in published decisions is indicative of a more insidious problem.  Applicants rarely request hearings to appeal rejections by a patent examiner, and when they do it is usually because they genuinely believe that the examiner has got it wrong, and that the additional effort and expense is justified by good prospects of a better outcome when the matter is considered by an experienced hearing officer.  The unprecedented rise in applicants requesting hearings on patent-eligibility is due to a lack of clarity and coherence in the law.  And the fact that those applicants are so frequently wasting their time and money reflects the fact that the Patent Office has been championing an interpretation of the law that is at odds with the way in which it is being interpreted by the applicants and the patent attorneys advising them.

To be clear, the Patent Office on the one hand, and applicants and their attorneys on the other, are looking at exactly the same case law, and arriving at completely different conclusions as to how that law applies to particular claims.  Over the period during which this situation has arisen, there have been five Full Bench decisions of the Federal Court of Australia that should have served to clarify the law, but which appear to have had the opposite effect.  (For the record, those decisions are Research Affiliates LLC v Commissioner of Patents [2014] FCAFC 150, Commissioner of Patents v RPL Central Pty Ltd [2015] FCAFC 177, Encompass Corporation Pty Ltd v InfoTrack Pty Ltd [2019] FCAFC 161, Commissioner of Patents v Rokt Pte Ltd [2020] FCAFC 86, and Commissioner of Patents v Aristocrat Technologies Australia Pty Ltd [2021] FCAFC 202.)

The Aristocrat decision is currently before the High Court, where it was heard on 9 and 10 June 2022 (transcripts at Aristocrat Technologies Australia Pty Ltd v Commissioner of Patents [2022] HCATrans 103 and [2022] HCATrans 104).  While it might be hoped that the High Court will provide the clarity that has been lacking in the Federal Court decisions, I am not so optimistic.  Looking at what has been happening at the Patent Office over the past few years, I fear that whatever the High Court may have to say about the specific claims at issue in Aristocrat will be equally open to different interpretations when applied to different claims in other cases.

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Tags: Australia, Computer programs, High Court, Innovation policy, Patentable subject matter

SMEs, Universities and Research Organisations Most Disadvantaged by Lack of a Patent Filing Grace Period, says EPO Study

Over the past two decades or so, the number of major jurisdictions offering some form of general ‘grace period’ for filing of patent applications has grown significantly.  This has largely been driven by bilateral agreements (e.g. free trade agreements involving the United States), and regional agreements such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), including provisions requiring the parties to provide a 12-month grace period.  With former hold-outs such as New Zealand, Japan and South Korea now having implemented grace periods in their national patent laws, Europe and China are currently the only two major jurisdictions in the world without a full-fledged grace period.  To my mind, it is an anomaly in this day and age of instantaneous global communication and publication that there are still countries that impose a strict novelty requirement, with the result that any public disclosure of an invention – accidental or deliberate – prior to filing remains fatal to the prospects of securing patent protection.

A new study recently published by the European Patent Office (EPO), The European patent system and the grace period: an impact analysis, is therefore a welcome contribution to ongoing debate as to whether, and how, the European patent system should harmonise with other major jurisdictions by introducing a general grace period.  Through surveys of users of the system between 2018 and 2020, the study seeks to:

1. evaluate the impact that the lack of a general grace period in Europe has on applicants in various categories, including European companies, universities and research organisations, and foreign applicants from the US, Japan and South Korea;
2. estimate the extent to which applicants would take advantage of any European grace period, and how this would depend upon the design of a grace period system; and
3. compare the perceived level of legal uncertainty that would be generated by the introduction of a grace period under different design options.

The survey sample is not unbiased.  For example, it does not include, by definition, entities that did not file applications during the selected three year period due to prior disclosures that precluded obtaining European patent rights in the absence of a grace period.  Even so, it appears that many participants have experience with grace periods across different jurisdictions, and have been affected in various ways by the lack of a grace period in Europe.  The results are therefore interesting, and appear likely to be indicative of wider experience, although they may underestimate the demand for the introduction of a European grace period.

The study found that the absence of a grace period has forced many applicants to postpone disclosures, with the most heavily affected being European small and medium enterprises (SMEs) at 10.4% and European universities at 12.1%.  For these entities, around two-thirds of these postponements had adverse consequences.  Universities reported a negative impact mostly on reputation or other aspects of their operations (such as delayed research publications).  For SMEs, the negative impact was roughly equally split across development/commercialisation and reputational factors.

Nonetheless, European businesses (small and large) are generally successful in avoiding pre-filing disclosures, reporting less than 1% of cases in which an application was prevented by a disclosure.  European universities, on the other hand, reported 7.8% of European applications being prevented due to a pre-filing disclosure, presumably reflecting the difficulty of enforcing disclosure restraints in an academic environment.  US companies also reported being heavily hit by the lack of a European grace period, with 7.2% of applications prevented by a pre-filing disclosure.

The study further found that the extent to which applicants would take advantage of a grace period, should one be introduced in Europe would be substantially affected by its design.  An unrestricted (i.e. ‘US-style’) design – with no declaration requirements, or preservation of prior user rights – was estimated to result in just over 25% of all European patent applications relying on the grace period (which seems like a very high proportion to me).  On the other hand, an ‘Australian-style’ system – which preserves rights for third parties that commence use of an invention following a disclosure, but before filing of a patent application – was estimated to result in under 10% of applications relying on the grace period.

While grace periods obviously benefit applicants, they create additional uncertainty in that the maximum delay between disclosure of an invention and publication of any patent application revealing the extent to which the invention may receive legal protection is extended from 18 months to as much as 30 months.  The study found that the perception of legal uncertainty among surveyed users of the European patent system was relatively high, driven primarily by European companies which harbour the greatest concerns by a significant margin.  ‘Perception’ is a nebulous concept, however, and there are good reasons to suspect that fear of the unknown is a major driver of survey responses here.

Overall, I would suggest that this EPO study bolsters the case for the introduction of a general grace period in Europe.  The leading argument in favour remains that of international harmonisation, with most other major jurisdictions now providing some form of grace period.  Adding to this, the study indicates that the lack of any similar provision in Europe has an adverse impact on a small, but not insignificant, number of applicants and prospective applicants.  The major counter-argument is that grace periods create legal uncertainty.  However, it is mainly European businesses that – when asked – perceive this as a significant consideration.  European universities and research organisations, along with applicants of all kinds from other jurisdictions which already provide grace periods (the US, Japan and South Korea), have far fewer concerns.

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Tags: Europe, Grace period, Innovation policy

Australian Medical/Biotech ‘Patent Box’ Tax Legislation Revealed

On 10 February 2022, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Concession for Australian Medical Innovations) Bill 2022 was introduced to the Australian parliament, and received its first and second readings in the House of Representatives.  The Bill represents the fulfilment of an undertaking in the Federal Government’s 2021 budget to introduce a ‘patent box’ scheme to encourage innovation and commercialisation in the Australian medical and biotechnology sectors.  A ‘patent box’ (the name refers either to an actual box on a form, or to a notional box into which a company allocates a proportion of its income) is a tax incentive scheme under which income that can be directly attributed to the commercialisation of patented technology (as distinct from other attributes, such as branding, know-how, or manufacturing capability) is taxed at a reduced rate. 

Under the scheme established by the legislation, the minimum concessional tax rate is 17%, compared with the normal corporate tax rate of 30% for large companies, or 25% for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).  However, the full benefit of the scheme is only available to the extent that R&D leading to development of a patented invention is conducted in Australia.

As the government had indicated in its original budget announcement, only medical and biotechnology inventions will be eligible for the patent box tax concession.  In particular, a patent will be eligible if it is ‘linked’ to a therapeutic good included on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG).  This means that a product, which is covered wholly or in part by the claims of the patent, must be a therapeutic good (e.g. a pharmaceutical substance or medical device) that requires, and has received, marketing approval in Australia.

Interestingly, however, the patent relied upon as the basis for eligibility under the patent box scheme need not be an Australian patent.  A patent will qualify under the scheme if it is an Australian standard patent (i.e. innovation patents are not eligible), a US utility patent, or a European patent granted under the European Patent Convention (EPC). 

It was initially proposed that only patents having a priority date after the announcement would qualify.  However, in further positive news, according to the Bill patents granted or issued after the date of the budget announcement (11 May 2021) will be eligible.

It is intended that the patent box concession will commence in the coming financial year, i.e. from 1 July 2022.  However, for this to happen the legislation will need to be passed in both houses of parliament before federal election is called.  It is widely anticipated that this will occur in early to mid April, shortly after the government hands down its budget on 29 March 2022.  With no further sitting days scheduled prior to budget week, it could become a race against time to get the legislation through.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Legislation, Patent box, Tax incentives

New Research Study from IP Australia Confirms IP Rights Ownership as a Signal to Identify Successful SMEs

If you are a policy-maker, prospective business partner or investor, IP Australia wants you to know that a useful way to identify small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with high growth potential is to look at their IP activity.  A new research report from the Office of the Chief Economist, titled Intellectual property rights and enterprise growth: The role of IP rights in the growth of SMEs, describes a study using data on the full population of Australian businesses – around 600,000 SMEs over the period 2002–2017 – to examine correlations between IP activity, employment, and growth of SMEs.  The study finds that, on average, SMEs that own IP rights (IPRs) are 3.5 times larger than SMEs with no IP rights (7 employees compared to 2 for SMEs with no IP rights).  Furthermore, rights-holders pay their employees better, with median annual wages being A$53,755 per employee compared to A$43,304 for SMEs with no IP rights.

My opening sentences above were very carefully chosen.  There is a risk that this study may be understood or reported in some quarters as implying the presence of a causal relationship between ownership of IP rights and business success.  It should go without saying, however, that (in the absence of evidence otherwise) correlation is not causation.  This is expressly acknowledged in the report itself (page 10), but IP Australia is also choosing its words carefully in promoting the report.  In information provided to media, the Director General, Michael Schwager, is quoted as saying:

This research paper presents evidence, for policy makers and business investors, that SMEs who file for IPRs are more likely to experience high growth than those who do not file for any IPRs.

On average, SMEs that own IP rights are around 3.5 times larger, are older and pay a higher median wage. SMEs filing for all the three types of IPRs, namely patents, trade marks, and designs, are the most likely to achieve high growth in terms of both turnover and employment.

To the casual reader, these statements might be taken to imply a causal relationship.  Saying that entities that do X are more likely to achieve Y arguably implies that X might be a good thing to do if your goal is to achieve Y.  But of course that is not true here.  If all anybody needed to do to succeed in business was to file a trade mark application, then I am sure everybody would be doing it!  An economist or statistician reading the above statements would merely find a few interesting facts regarding the observed relationships between IPR ownership, business growth, company size, longevity, and employee remuneration.  They would see nothing regarding any causal relationship among these characteristics.  All they would learn is that entities represented in the study data that have achieved Y are also more likely than average to have done X.

It is also notable that Michael Schwager’s statements specifically address policy makers and investors.  What about business owners?  Surely they would want to know how to maximise their prospects of success?  Well, of course they would.  But this study, by itself, tells them nothing about how to achieve that outcome.  Just because more successful businesses are more likely to own more IPRs does not imply that simply filing more applications for IPRs is the hidden secret to business success!

So, let’s delve a little more deeply into this report and see what else it tells us about IPRs and successful SMEs, and attempt to infer, from its findings, something about what makes an SME successful, and where other SMEs should be looking to find exemplars from which they can learn.

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Tags: Economics, Innovation policy, IP Australia

‘Patent Box’ Update – the Devil is in the Details When it Comes to Dates

I previously reported on the Australian government’s budget announcement that it will be introducing a so-called ‘patent box’ tax incentive for medical and biotech (and, possibly, clean energy) innovations.  Implementation details of the scheme are yet to be worked out, and the government is promising to consult closely with industry on the design of the patent box.  However, while the final form of the scheme – which will not come into effect until 1 July 2022 – may not be known for many months, there is already at least one critical issue that prospective users of the system may need to consider.

The government’s fact sheet on ‘tax incentives to support the recovery’ states that ‘…granted patents, which were applied for after the Budget announcement, will be eligible’.  There is, as yet, no clear indication of what the government means by ‘applied for’, however in its ‘What’s New’ email (to which you can subscribe here), sent on 14 May 2021, IP Australia states that ‘[t]o be eligible, the patent must have a priority date after 11 May 2021…’.  Being unable to find this detail in the budget papers, I sent out a tweet asking whether anybody else had seen it, and tagging @IPAustralia, which responded:

Hi Mark, thanks for your comment. This is our understanding of the announcement. Further details on the patent box will be released in the coming weeks by Treasury as part of the public consultation.

— IP Australia (@IPAustralia) May 14, 2021

There is a big difference between ‘priority date’ and ‘filing date’, which hopefully will be open for discussion during the public consultation.  If the critical date is the priority date, then this means that Australian medical and biotech innovators who have already filed a priority application (e.g. a provisional application) prior to the budget announcement would not be eligible for the patent box tax incentive if they subsequently file a complete application claiming the benefit of the provisional filing date.  On the other hand, if they were now to file the same complete application in Australia without a priority claim, then they would be eligible for the scheme upon grant of any resulting patent.

The risk of dropping a valid claim to priority, of course, is there there may be intervening prior art that could invalidate or limit the scope of the claims, which has been made public after the priority date, but before the subsequent complete filing date.  To minimise this risk, the complete application should be filed as soon as possible. 

Fortunately, the Australian grace period protects an applicant against their own disclosures during the 12 months prior to the complete filing date.  Furthermore, the discovery of intervening prior art would not be fatal, at least up until grant of the patent (see regulation 10.2B(7) of the Patents Regulations 1991), since the patent request could be amended to include the priority claim, with the consequence that the patent box incentive would then be unavailable.

The choice to file in Australia without claiming priority would not affect the applicant’s right to claim priority in other jurisdiction, either through direct applications or via the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

But, frankly, this seems perverse.  To my mind, the logical choice for the critical date is the filing date of the complete patent application, which commences the patent term of up to 20 years during which the patent box tax incentive could be claimed.  Basing eligibility on the priority date will simply encourage strategies, such as I have outlined above, to engineer eligibility.  This does not serve anybody’s interests.  The government will not make significant savings on the operation of the patent box scheme, while applicants will feel compelled to adapt their patent filing strategies simply to comply with an arbitrary choice of eligibility criteria.

Hopefully, through the consultation process, common sense will prevail.  In the meantime, however, medical and biotech innovators with pending priority applications should probably seek advice from their patent attorneys.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Public policy, Tax incentives

Australian Government Announces a (Sort of) ‘Patent Box’ Tax Incentive

This week, the Australian government handed down its annual budget.  At the risk of sounding overly cynical, I am always sceptical about how many of the policy measures announced in the budget will actually come to fruition, given that their funding is often dependent on hazy forecasts of future economic performance, and their implementation may span many years during which future budgets – and potentially new governments – may come and go, bringing their own priorities and revised forecasts.  But even I cannot help sitting up and taking notice when patents get a mention, with all of the ensuing media coverage that brings during the budget frenzy!

So the ‘big news’ is that the government is going to introduce a ‘patent box’ tax incentive scheme in Australia… sort of.  If you are not already familiar with the concept, a ‘patent box’ – the name refers either to an actual box on a form, or to a notional box into which a company allocates a proportion of its income – is a tax incentive scheme under which income that can be directly attributed to the commercialisation of patented technology (as distinct from other attributes, such as branding, know-how, or manufacturing capability) is taxed at a reduced rate.  Other income continues to be taxed at the standard corporate rate.

The Australian patent box scheme is actually going to be somewhat limited, initially applying only to medical and biotech patents, with the possibility that it might also be made available to the clean energy sector.  The incentive will only be available on income generated from patents applied for after the budget announcement (i.e. pre-existing patents and application will not be eligible).  And it will not come into effect until 1 July 2022.  The tax rate on eligible income will be 17%, compared with the normal corporate tax rate of 30% for large companies, or 25% for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).  This discounted rate is higher than other countries that operate a patent box system, e.g. France 15%, Spain 12%, UK 10%, Belgium 6.8%, Luxembourg 5.84%, and Netherlands 5%.  Even taking into account that a number of these countries have a lower corporate tax rate than Australia, equal or larger discounts are also available elsewhere, e.g., in France (where the corporate tax rate is 32.02%), Spain (25%), Belgium (25%), and Luxembourg (24.94%).

So – true to form – the Australian patent box will be a very ‘middle-of-the-road’ affair, with limited eligibility, and relatively modest tax discounts, especially for SMEs that are already subject to a lower tax rate than larger corporates.  As it so often does, the government has decided to limit its exposure by picking winners – this time, medical and biotechnology industries – leaving other sectors (such as IT, where Australian companies such as Atlassian, Canva, Afterpay, Judo Bank, Zip Co, and AirWallex have been punching well above their weight) to fend for themselves.  Or, more likely, to move their R&D activities overseas, into more favourable jurisdictions.

On the other hand, the announcement is something of a turnaround for this government, considering that criticism among G20 finance ministers in 2014, and a 2015 review commissioned by the Office of the Chief Economist in the Department of Industry delivered negative conclusions that seemed to have killed off any prospect a patent box scheme being introduced in Australia.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Public policy, Tax incentives

China to Cancel Patent Subsidies, and Emphasise Quality Over Quantity

As highlighted in a report recently published by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), entitled Trademarks and Patents in China: The Impact of Non-Market Factors on Filing Trends and IP Systems, the high rate of Chinese patent and trademark filings in recent years is widely believed to have been influenced by government subsidies and other ‘non-market factors’.  Since at least 2011, some Chinese applicants appear to have been taking advantage of the Australian innovation patent system to maximise the subsidies they are able to claim for foreign patent grants.  In 2020, Chinese residents were by far the largest users of the system, filing more innovation patent applications than all other nationalities combined.

But could it be that the days of government subsidies, and an associated massive growth in patent applications originating in China, are drawing to a close?

On 27 January 2021, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) announced, in a notification entitled ‘Notice of the CNIPA on Further Strictly Regulating Patent Application Behaviour’ (in Chinese) (‘Notice’), that many lucrative subsidies must end by the middle of this year, with all others to be phased out by 2025.  (A brief report of the Notice can be found on the China IP Law Update blog, while a Google translation of the Chinese original is quite comprehensible.)

The Notice states that the overriding objective of the new regulations on patent application behaviour is:

In order to thoroughly study and implement Xi Jinping’s thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era; to earnestly implement the decisions and deployments of the Party Central Committee and the State Council; and to earnestly promote China’s transformation from a major importer of intellectual property rights to a major country of IP creation, and from the pursuit of quantity to the improvement of quality.

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Tags: China, Innovation policy, Patent filing

Winners & Losers in Patent Filings – Why 2019 Was a Bad Year for Many Major Attorney Firms, and for Australia

In my previous article, I looked at the top applicants for Australian patents in 2019.  In this article, I turn the spotlight on the Australian patent attorney firms that were responsible for handling many of those filings.  Having identified a 1% decline overall in standard patent filings, a nearly 20% decline in innovation patent filings, and essentially no change in provisional applications, it stands to reason that the Australian patent attorney profession as a whole has not experienced any growth in patent filing work over 2019.  However, as we shall see, the pain has not been shared equally across the profession.

Based on total patent filing numbers alone (which is, of course, not the whole story – although for many firms it is a significant part of it) the big winners in 2019 were, by and large, smaller independent firms, which appear to have beaten out a number of larger firms in acquiring new filing work.  Among the bigger and better-known brands, however, there is little evidence that ownership status – i.e. whether a firm is privately-held, or a member of either of one the listed IPH (ASX:IPH) or QANTM IP (ASX:QIP) groups – was a significant factor in securing filing work.  Size, rather than ownership, appears to correlate more closely with whether filing numbers grew or declined in 2019.

Comparing with my analysis for the 2018 calendar year, the top 10 firms for overall patent filings in 2019 remained unchanged, with Spruson & Ferguson, Davies Collison Cave (DCC), Griffith Hack, FB Rice, Phillips Ormonde Fitzpatrick (POF), Pizzeys, Shelston IP, FPA Patent Attorneys, Watermark (soon to be merged into Griffith Hack), and Madderns all taking their places in the same order as the previous year.  However, all but DCC experienced a decline in overall filings, and in standard application filings.

Aside from DCC’s gain in standard application filings, and a strong showing from Spruson & Ferguson on innovation patent filings, listed-group firms generally went backwards in 2019, with the winners across all application types (i.e. standard, provisional, and innovation) being privately-held firms.  However, this seems to have had less to do with ownership structure than size, and a general trend in favour of smaller firms over larger ones (which I have previously noted with respect to Australian SME clients, but which appears to be true more broadly).  With the notable exception of a significant growth in provisional application filings by FB Rice, the larger privately-held firms (which also include POF, Wrays and Madderns in Australia, and New Zealand based James & Wells) also failed to make gains in filing numbers in 2019.

While most people outside the profession probably care little for the business challenges faced by patent attorneys, I would argue that a bad year for attorney firms is also a bad year for Australia.  It is well-established that innovation underpins improvements in productivity and a rise in the standard of living (preferably with a reduced environmental impact), and demand for patent attorney services is (or should be) linked to levels of innovative activity.  Logically, then, stagnation in demand for such services is not good news for the nation.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Patent analytics, Patent attorney profession

IP Australia Launches 2019 Annual IP Report on World Intellectual Property Day

World Intellectual Property Day is celebrated each year on the 26^th of April.  This year, the theme is ‘Reach for Gold: IP and Sports’.  To read more about World IP Day 2019, and to explore how ‘innovation, creativity and the IP rights that encourage and protect them support the development of sport and its enjoyment around the world’, feel free to head on over to the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).  Because this article is not about World IP Day, or the role of IP in sports.  It is about how IP Australia is marking the occasion – with the launch of its Australian Intellectual Property Report 2019.

As I reported at around this time last year, the 2018 annual report attracted a fairly negative response in certain circles, with InnovationAus reporter Stuart Kennedy calling it a ‘damning report card on patent filing’, after earlier writing disparagingly about the allegedly ‘shocking’ revelation that ‘poker machine king Aristocrat Technologies’ had been the top Australian-resident patent applicant for 2017 which, in its ‘quest to find fresh ways to relieve pokie players of their dough, crushed the patent application efforts of CSIRO by a factor of more than three.’

In light of last year’s experience, it is perhaps unsurprising that the ‘patents’ section of the 2019 IP Report avoids mention of the fact that Aristocrat was once again the top Australian filer.  As I reported back in January, in 2018 the company increased its haul of new standard patent applications by 60% over 2017, to 252 – reaching almost five times the number of applications (55) filed by CSIRO.  If the ratio of the number of applications filed by a leading commercial entity in the gaming industry to the number filed by Australia’s flagship public research organisation is any kind of measure of research output – which it emphatically is not – then this would be a far worse result than the previous year.  Of course, not all patents are created equal, and the truth is that there is no conflict in celebrating the international successes of both Aristocrat – a great Australian company in its field, setting aside personal views on the merits, or otherwise, of gambling – and CSIRO – which has generated globally-significant outcomes including influenza drug Relenza, polymer banknote technology, and key technologies underlying high-speed Wi-Fi, among many others.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Patent analytics, Patent Office

Proposed Merger of QANTM IP and Xenith IP – Another Symptom of a Great Malaise in the Australian IP Services Market?

On 27 November 2018 QANTM IP Limited (ASX:QIP) and Xenith IP Group Limited (ASX:XIP) announced that they have entered into an agreement to merge through an all-scrip scheme of arrangement.  The merger is subject to approval by a court, and by Xenith shareholders.  If it goes ahead (as seems likely), each Xenith share will be exchanged for 1.22 QANTM shares.  Existing QANTM and Xenith shareholders will end up owning 55% and 45%, respectively, of the merged group, which will comprise five Australian specialist IP firms (Davies Collison Cave, FPA Patent Attorneys, Griffith Hack, Shelston IP and Watermark), along with IP valuation, innovation and advisory service provider Glasshouse Advisory (currently owned by Xenith IP) and Malaysian IP firm Advanz Fidelis (which was acquired by QANTM IP in June 2018). 

Based on the closing share price of QANTM and Xenith on 26 November 2018, the merged group would have a market capitalisation of A$285.2 million, which still places it well behind the original listed Australian IP group, IPH Limited (ASX:IPH), which had a market cap of A$1.11 billion as at close of trading on 30 November 2018.

An additional interesting piece of information to fall out of the QANTM/Xenith announcement is the fact that IPH had itself been courting QANTM with a view to a possible merger or acquisition.  In an ASX announcement on 27 November 2018, in response to ‘media speculation’, IPH confirmed making a number of approaches to QANTM on the basis of non-binding, conditional proposals, culminating on 20 November 2018 with a proposal with an equivalent value of A$1.80 per QANTM share (a notional premium of 37.4% over the A$1.31 at which QANTM shares were trading on that day).  QANTM countered by announcing that its Board did not consider this proposal to be in best interests of its shareholders, due to its ‘highly conditional’ nature and ‘significant execution risk’.

All this would appear to confirm something that I have long suspected – that the Australian market is not big enough to sustain three publicly-listed groups of IP service providers.  IPH obviously saw QANTM as a potential acquisition target, while QANTM clearly did not wish to be acquired on IPH’s terms!  Instead, QANTM and Xenith have decided that they will be stronger together than they are separately.

But why is it such a struggle for these groups to flourish in the Australian market?  One advantage of the public listing of these companies is that, through their annual reports, there is now far greater transparency than ever before in respect of the financial performance of IP services businesses.  In combination with publicly-available data on Australian filings for IP rights, this provides useful insights into where the revenues – and profits – are coming from.  I have looked at these numbers, and I am afraid that my conclusions are not rosy.  The Australian market appears to be stagnant, with firms struggling to enhance profitability.  Growth in the listed groups has come through acquisitions rather than genuine new business, with revenues per professional staff member being pretty consistent across the industry.  Low-value, transactional work, which ought to have the greatest exposure to competition and downward price pressure, continues to be significantly more profitable than high-value, bespoke services.  Yet, despite the obvious challenges and risks that these circumstances present, as far as I can tell firms are continuing to do the same old things that they have done for years, in terms of professional staff management and marketing, with the predictable result that nothing much is changing.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, IPGOD, Patent attorney profession

‘Innovation’ Drops From the Agenda as Yet Another Sitting Australian Prime Minister Given the Boot

Last week, Australia got a new Prime Minister, with former Treasurer Scott Morrison replacing former lawyer, investment banker, tech investor, and republican Malcolm Turnbull.  However, lest any foreigners, hermits, or future historians who have perhaps stumbled upon this article in the National Library’s Pandora Archive, assume that this is a sign of a robust democracy recognising the will of the people, I should point out that it was not as a result of a general election, but of internal sniping and fighting within a governing party.  As many readers will be aware, this is now ‘normal’ in Australia – the last elected Prime Minister to actually lead their party to a subsequent election was John Howard in 2007.  Since then, we have had just three further elections, but five changes of Prime Minister.

In September 2015, when Turnbull deposed Tony Abbott as Prime Minister of Australia, a wave of positive sentiment swept through Australia’s innovation community – among which I count the many entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, technologists, investors, and associated professional services providers (including patent attorneys) whom I encountered at various meetings, events, and seminars during those heady early days of the Turnbull Government.  The reason for this was partly because many of those people viewed Malcolm Turnbull as a kindred spirit, with personal, hands-on experience as an investor in technology businesses, and a generally progressive and positive attitude towards science, technology, and innovation.  Additionally, Turnbull’s first major policy announcement was of an investment of A$1.1 billion over four years in a ‘national innovation and science agenda’, in which he called for an ‘ideas boom’ to replace the ‘mining boom’ (and, more generally, Australia’s reliance on primary industry for exports), and declared his desire to see a cultural shift to embrace risk-taking, and destigmatise failure.

Ah… halcyon days!

Over less than three years, however, most of that initial positive energy has dissipated, to be replaced with disillusionment and disappointment, as talk of innovation at the top levels of government petered out to little more than a whisper.  And now, with the change in ‘leadership’ (I use the word advisedly), it seems that ‘innovation’ is completely off the agenda.  In particular, in announcing his new Cabinet, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has ditched the word entirely, with Karen Andrews being appointed Minister for Industry, Science and Technology (which presumably means that the Department formerly known as Industry, Innovation and Science is to be similarly renamed), and former Minister for Jobs and Innovation, Michaelia Cash, now appointed as Minister for Small and Family Business, Skills and Vocational Education.

So how did this happen?  How did ‘innovation’ go from a A$1.1 billion policy imperative to being a dirty word in government in under three years?

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Tags: Australia, Innovation, Innovation policy, Politics

Australia Again Fares Woefully in Capitalising on Innovation in WIPO’s Annual Index

Last week, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) published its Global Innovation Index 2018 (GII) report, as it has done every year since 2011.  Jointly authored with Cornell University and the INSEAD Business School in France, the GII is intended to provide ‘a detailed quantitative tool that helps global decision makers better understand how to stimulate the innovative activity that drives economic and human development.’  It ranks 126 economies based on 80 indicators, ranging from intellectual property filing rates to mobile-application creation, education spending, and scientific and technical publications.

In 2018, Australia ranks 20^th overall, which is a gain of three places since 2017.  The countries that were ahead of Australia and that have slipped behind in 2018 are New Zealand (now 22^nd, down from 21^st), Austria (down from 20^th to 21^st), and Iceland (crashing down from 13^th in 2017 to 23^rd in 2018).

Yet, while Australia has risen slightly in the overall rankings, it continues to languish in a pathetic 76^th place, i.e. in exactly the same position as last year, in a measure that I regard as particularly telling – the ‘innovation efficiency ratio’, which indicates how much innovation ‘output’ the country is getting in return for its innovation ‘inputs’.  Australia’s efficiency ratio is just 58%, which compares to the median of 61%, and is way below the values for those countries that are most effective at converting innovation inputs into outputs, such as Switzerland (96%), Luxembourg (94%), China (92%), the Netherlands (91%), and Ukraine (90%).  Yes, you read that correctly – Ukraine is the fifth highest performing economy on innovation efficiency because, while it ranks just 43^rd overall in the GII, and a rather poor 75^th on innovation inputs, its effectiveness in converting those inputs places it at number 35 in the output ranking.

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Tags: Innovation, Innovation policy, Politics

Computer-Implemented Inventions and the ‘Ball Point Pen Principle’ – Why the Australian Law on Patent-Eligibility is a Mess

The law – and Patent Office practice – relating to the assessment and examination of patents and applications for computer-implemented inventions in Australia is currently a complete mess.  I challenge anyone – whether an inventor, applicant, patent attorney, patent examiner, Patent Office hearing officer, IP lawyer, barrister or judge – to provide a coherent explanation of how to go about deciding whether an invention involving the use of a computer is eligible for patent protection.  I myself cannot do it, so I would genuinely love to have someone explain it to me.

In this article, I will show you where a unanimous Full Court panel of three judges of the Federal Court of Australia – the highest legal authority to have considered patent-eligibility of computer-implemented inventions in this country – clearly stated that it is impermissible to consider the state of the prior art in assessing whether or not the subject matter of an invention is patent-eligible, i.e. a ‘manner of manufacture’ in the terminology used in the Australian law.  Notably, subsequent Full Court panels have thrice accepted the correctness of this decision without criticism.  Then I will show you where a single judge of the Federal Court recently found an invention to comprise ineligible subject matter on the basis that various components of the claims are known from the prior art. 

I will also show you where a Patent Office hearing officer, in upholding the rejection of a patent application by an examiner, expressly stated that it is legitimate to consider the prior art when assessing patent-eligibility of computer-related subject matter.  I will point you to a recent opposition decision in which the hearing officer found that the claimed invention was not patent-eligible, despite an examiner having accepted the application, and the applicant being successful in establishing that the claims involved an inventive step over prior art raised by the opponent.  And I will identify a further four Patent Office decisions – in addition to 13 published since the beginning of 2017 that I listed last November – in which applications for computer-implemented inventions have been refused, including one relating to an application by Google which cites the aforementioned decision to justify considering prior art when deciding subject-matter eligibility.  In these decisions, the Patent Office is continuing to apply its adaptation of the England and Wales Court of Appeals’ four-step test for patentable subject matter, as set out in Aerotel Ltd v Telco Holdings Ltd; Macrossan’s Application, [2006] EWCA Civ 1371 (Aerotel/Macrossan), despite a lack of any clear authority for this approach in Australia.

Meanwhile, one of two Federal Court appeals of Patent Office decisions has been terminated following unsuccessful mediation, while the other has been delayed after the parties decided that expert evidence is required.  Yes – expert evidence to address whether or not an invention is a ‘manner of manufacture’, which is supposed to be a question of law, on which technical experts have no authority.

This is all, frankly, terrible for the state of patent law, and for high-tech innovation, in Australia.  Literally nobody really knows what the law is.  It is not just that patent applicants, and their attorneys, do not agree with the Patent Office about what is, and is not, patentable.  The Patent Office does not agree with itself!  Inventions that are receiving approval in examination are being rejected in opposition.  Attorneys, examiners, hearing officers and judges are finding it all but impossible to extract coherent principles from the relevant Full Court decisions, without exposing inconsistencies in those decisions.  In Federal Court, technical experts are being called in to shed light on something that is supposed to be a legal issue.  As I recently reported, the examination section that deals with inventions related to computing has the lowest acceptance rates in the Australian Patent Office.  All of this speaks to the uncertainty that currently surrounds what is, and is not, patentable when it comes to computer-implemented invention.

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Tags: Australia, Business processes, Computer programs, Innovation policy, Patent Office, Patentable subject matter

Australian Patent Performance is the Victim of a Vortex of Negativity, and Education (Alone) is Not the Solution

In my previous article, I wrote about low patent-filing rates by Australian innovators, and lamented that this is the continuation of the country’s long history of giving intellectual property away for free.  And while occasionally this has been done intentionally, with good (if misguided) intentions, more often it is the result of a failure, through ignorance or inadvertence, to recognise and protect IP where suitable forms of protection are, in fact, available.  I speculated that there may be some fairly persistent cultural biases that keep IP protection generally, and patents in particular, off the radar of many Australian innovators, and I suggested that lifting Australians’ use of the patent system may require little more than some effort at self-education, and a change in mindset.

Thinking about this further, however, I have realised that it is mindset-change that represents the real challenge here.  There already exist many resources to assist Australian innovators in improving their IP awareness and knowledge.  IP Australia provides a range of educational materials, including videos published via its YouTube channel, and (in a very welcome change from its reticence just a few years ago) is active on both Facebook and Twitter.  It also does a lot of outreach and educational work through email lists, seminars/webinars and other events.  Another major source of information is the Australian IP profession – patent attorneys, trade marks attorneys, and IP lawyers.  Most patent attorneys, for example, do not charge for initial consultations, and between phone enquiries and initial meetings often provide over an hour of free education and general advice before a potential client makes a decision on whether to proceed or not.  And for every such enquiry that leads to paid work, there may be half-a-dozen or more that go nowhere.  IP Australia’s recently-developed ‘Engaging an Attorney Toolkit’ is yet another good educational resource, which assists innovators in getting the most out of their initial contact with a patent attorney.

However, there is nothing new about the availability of many of these types of educational materials.  Furthermore, while they have been growing in number and quality over recent years, there has been – as the charts in my previous article show – absolutely no real growth in the numbers of patents being filed by Australians, in Australia and elsewhere, over this period.  Just today, I attended IP Australia’s first ever IP Summit, ‘Launch to Export’, where rooms of interested members of the public heard about various aspects of IP protection, government assistance programs, and the experiences of successful entrepreneurs.  My guess, however, is that this event will also have no impact on patent filings.

What I realised, as I looked around the room, is that all of these educational events, efforts and materials have one thing in common – the people who engage with them have already made the decision that they need to find out more about IP.  The information may now be more readily-available, and of higher quality, than in the past, but what has not changed is that the subset of innovators and entrepreneurs actually motivated to seek IP knowledge has not fundamentally changed.  Unlike the schooling of children, neither the government, nor anybody else, has the power to make IP education compulsory!  Nor is it a question of leading the horse to water in the hope that it may decide to drink – the horse has refused the bridle, cantered across the paddock, jumped the fence, and decided to forego all aqueous opportunities in favour of pursuing its own interests elsewhere!

So the educational content is available, but we need to get Australian innovators and entrepreneurs to want to consume it.  To make that happen, we are going to have to figure out why there is so little interest in IP in general, and patents in particular.  I maintain that this is largely a cultural issue, and I hypothesise here that there is a reinforcing feedback system operating, that I will call the ‘vortex of negativity’!  To drag the mindset of Australians caught in this vortex back into the light, where they can evaluate the potential value of patenting their innovation with clear and unbiased vision (and I am not, of course, suggesting that patents are always the right choice), I suggest that we may need to appeal to their basest economic instincts, by providing clear financial incentives or rewards to businesses that patent their new technology.  And I have a few modest proposals as to how this might be done!

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Tags: Government programs, Innovation, Innovation policy, Tax incentives

Australians Must Step-Up On Patents, Stop Giving Away Free IP!

There is a famous story about how the insect repellent Aerogard^® became a household name in Australia.  It involves a visit to Australia in 1963 by Queen Elizabeth II, in the course of which Her Majesty was sprayed with a formulation developed by CSIRO entomologist Doug Waterhouse, containing the chemical N, N-diethyl-meta-toluamide (DEET), to ward off the country’s numerous and persistent flies.  (Apparently, clouds of the insects had interfered with the famous Royal Wave on a previous visit.)  Within days, the Mortein company requested the formula from Waterhouse, who obligingly handed it over gratis, as was CSIRO policy at the time – three cheers for the great generosity of the Australian taxpayer!  The rest, as they say, is history … including the inevitable 1969 acquisition of the Australian Aerogard product and brand by British company Reckitt & Colman (now the massive multinational conglomerate Reckitt Benckiser).  Other innovations commonly touted as having originated in Australia, but capitalised upon elsewhere, include the black box flight recorder, heart pacemaker, photovoltaic cells, and X-ray crystallography.

While CSIRO is no longer in the game of giving away valuable intellectual property for free, sadly it seems the same cannot be said for Australian innovators more generally.  Otherwise, how are we to explain a stagnation in patent filings by Australian residents?  Over eight years, from 2009 to 2016 – the most recent year for which numbers are available at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) IP Statistics Data Center – the number of Australian patent applications filed by Australians barely varied from around 2500 per year.  Australians actually file more US patent applications than they do Australian applications, however these numbers are also stagnant, fluctuating around 3700 applications over the same eight-year period.  In 2016, the rate of US patent filings by Australian applicants was 152 applications per million population.  In the same year, US applications by US applicants ran at 913 per million population.

Surely the reason for the low filing rates, and lack of growth in filings, cannot be a lack of Australian innovation?  According to the 2017 Global Innovation Index (GII) Report, Australia ranks 23^rd out of 127 countries for innovation performance, which is not great.  Significantly, however, Australia fares much better on ‘input’ metrics than on ‘output’ metrics.  Input metrics capture elements of the national economy that enable innovative activities, and encompass institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, and business sophistication.  Australia ranks 12^th on the innovation inputs sub-index, and performs particularly well on infrastructure (ranked 7^th), human capital and research (9^th) and market sophistication (9^th). 

But even though Australia is (mostly) well-placed to generate positive innovation outcomes, it has long lacked the ability to follow-through.  On the GII outputs sub-index Australia ranks a lowly 30^th, while on the innovation efficiency ratio (outputs divided by inputs) the country ranks an abysmal 76^th.

Furthermore, on the input side Australian businesses lack sophistication, with the country ranking 27^th on this group of metrics.  Tellingly, the business sophistication group of metrics includes ‘patent families filed in two or more national offices’ (relative to GDP by Purchasing Power Parity), in which Australia performs appallingly, by any standard.  Australia’s score on this metric is just 1.0, which compares to the USA on 5.0, Japan on 15.5, Korea on 16.3, and New Zealand on 4.7.  It is hardly any comfort that the UK (2.5) and Canada (2.9) are not great performers on this metric, either – they are still doing a lot better than Australia.

In my experience, ‘lack of sophistication’ pretty much sums it up when it comes to many Australians’ attitudes towards intellectual property generally, and patents in particular.  Too many Australian innovators and businesses simply do not understand intellectual property.  They ignore it, put it in the ‘too hard’ basket, are ignorant about it, or are sceptical or even actively hostile towards it.  Certainly they do not value it highly, and many are extremely reluctant to spend any money on it.  But in choosing not to protect their intellectual property, these businesses are, in effect, just giving it away for free, as surely as CSIRO once did as a matter of policy.

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Tags: Innovation, Innovation policy, Patent analytics

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

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

Looking for a Patent Attorney? Check Out IP Australia’s ‘Engaging an Attorney Toolkit’

IP Australia – the government authority responsible for (among other things) examining and granting Australian patents – has just published its Engaging an Attorney Toolkit, an online ‘guide on how, why, what and when to engage your patent attorney.’  The toolkit is the result of a project undertaken in the second half of 2017, with the assistance of external branding and communications consultants, having the aim of dispelling myths and closing knowledge gaps around patent protection.  It is intended primarily to assist people and businesses with minimal knowledge and experience of the patent system in preparing to engage with an attorney.

In the course of the project, online surveys and interviews were conducted with various stakeholders, including patent attorneys (full disclosure: I was one of the patent attorneys interviewed), to identify what new prospective patent applicants know, do not know, and should know, about the process of obtaining a patent.  Naturally, IP Australia is primarily concerned with assisting the public, and is hoping that the toolkit will help to reduce costs and make it easier and more attractive for innovators with limited understanding of the patent system to engage with an attorney.  If it is successful, however, the toolkit will also benefit attorneys by creating better-prepared and more knowledgeable clients, reducing the time and effort often required to educate them about what to expect from their attorney, and from the patent system.

It is no secret that I have been a critic of some of IP Australia’s educational resources in the past.  Almost exactly one year ago I wrote about its information on ‘what to include in your application’, calling its downplaying of the importance of obtaining professional assistance ‘rubbish’, and suggesting that:

…for the overwhelming majority of prospective applicants, ‘seeking assistance from a patent attorney’ is not something that they ‘may consider’.  It is an essential step without which they might as well flush their application fees, and whatever their own time and effort is worth, straight down the toilet!

This might seem harsh, but it was backed by an analysis, based on IP Australia’s own data, of extremely poor outcomes for self-represented applicants when compared with those employing the services of patent attorneys.  IP Australia, to its credit, engaged positively with this criticism, and within two months had updated a number of pages on its website with stronger recommendations on the value of obtaining professional assistance and advice.

Compared to this short-term fix, however, the Engaging an Attorney Toolkit is a huge leap forward.  Not only does it contain valuable information, in an accessible format, but the very fact that it now exists sends a clear message to prospective applicants about the importance of seeking professional assistance.  For the first time, ‘Engaging an attorney’ is now a headline topic on the main page on applying for a patent, along with a link to the toolkit.  With just one small caveat (of which, more later) I would have no hesitation, if I were still working as a private-practice attorney, in referring prospective clients to the toolkit in the expectation that it would make the early stages of our engagement run more smoothly.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Patent attorney profession, Patent Office