Further intellectual property cooperation proposed amid pandemic

A coalition of the world's five leading intellectual property offices, known as the IP5, has pledged to take further measures and share best practices in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, and promoting innovation to contribute to economic and social recovery.

The members of the IP5 are China's National Intellectual Property Administration (NIPA), the European Patent Office, the Japan Patent Office, the Korean Intellectual Property Office, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Heads of the five offices made a joint statement at their 13th annual meeting on Tuesday via a videoconference chaired by Shen Changyu, head of the NIPA.

Intellectual property plays a key role in boosting economic recovery and creating employment. The five offices will continue to provide high-quality services to inventors and researchers around the world, helping them attract investment, expand markets, and foster technology transfer, according to the statement.

This year, the five offices have taken a series of measures to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on applicants and spur virus-related innovation, including offering IP assistance and facilitating access to patent information.

The five offices should enhance international IP cooperation on their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Shen said at the meeting.

Apart from responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, they also stressed cooperation in the fields of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence.

The offices began meeting in 2007 and have since worked together to improve the quality and efficiency of the patent examination process. In 2019, they handled approximately 85 percent of the world's patent applications, and 93 percent of the work carried out under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, an international patent law treaty.