Possibly not too many people will care about this, but Ecuador appears determined to assure itself of a place at the bottom of the heap when it comes to innovation, if upcoming changes to official fees are anything to go by.First, a hat-tip – we are grateful to fellow patent attorney Eddie Walker, of FB Rice, for bringing the Ecuadorian fee changes to our attention. Ecuador is not a country that would normally capture the attention of this blog, however these fee hikes are so outrageously disproportionate to… well… anything, really, that we cannot resist sharing them! But on a more serious note, there are also some observations that may be worth making about the role of IP in developing nations, and why Ecuador’s approach is potentially antithetical to the country’s interests.
In a nutshell, any day now the official fees payable to the Ecuadorian Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) in respect of various patent services will rise by up to 3629%! No, that is not a typo, and a decimal point has not been inadvertently omitted. The final year patent maintenance fee is indeed slated to rise by a factor of over 36 times, from US$572 to US$20,760.07. By comparison, the basic application fee will increase by a mere 697%, from US$404 to US$2,816.13.
On the positive side, discounts of up to 90% will be available for certain classes of applicants, namely small and medium-sized companies, universities acknowledged in Ecuador, independent inventors, public institutions, small and medium-sized farmers, and cooperative companies. In other words, everybody but the foreign companies, multinational corporations and large local companies that are most able to afford to conduct R&D, introduce new products and service, and drive innovation in a developing country such as Ecuador.
Developing nations are inevitably net importers of new technology, innovation, skills and enterprise. There is no value in reinventing the wheel – or anything else, for that matter – and it is far better to provide incentives for foreign investment, including robust patent protections, R&D tax benefits and so forth. With good management, the country can then build its own domestic capabilities and industries off the back of this initial bootstrapping.
Ecuador, however, seems determined to give foreign investors every reason to look elsewhere for development opportunities.
Draft amendments to the 
In handing down the 2012 Budget last week, the Australian Government has approved the changes to IP Australia’s fees, which were foreshadowed back in December 2011 (see 
