The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) released its World Intellectual Property Indicators 2019 recently and reports on the numeric state of affairs in intellectual property worldwide in 2018.
Many trends are predictable. Asia’s activity is ever more noticeable. WIPO proclaims, “Asia is the hub of global patent filings” now, with two thirds of all filings taking place within this region. Principally, the quantity of patent filings by applicants from the People’s Republic of China (China)—about 1.5 million out of 3.3 million patent filings globally—is staggering. The dominance of the (China) in many sectors of intellectual property filings and registrations (2nd only to the US in number of patents in effect, with 2.4 milion). Chinese filings for patents, utility models, industrial designs, trademarks, and plant varieties were all ranked most in the world and marked double-digit percentage increases over 2017 filings (Indicators, p. 7).
Interestingly, an overwhelming majority of Chinese filings at this point are limited to domestic ones. Japan came in 2nd to the US with number of domestic applicants foreign filings (which show interest in foreign markets and/or production), at over 205,000 (Indicators, p. 15). Japan filed over 85,000 of its number to the USPTO, and another 45,000 to the PRC’s patent office (SIPO). Meanwhile, China’s foreign filings were only one third of that and also heavily favored US filings (nearly half of its 66,000, 32,000, to the USPTO). Likely, many Chinese applicants do not feel a need to apply to markets much smaller than their domestic one, or otherwise want to target the influential American market (Indicators, pp. 33-34, Statistics A19, A20), while Japanese applicants to China have an interest in production in China as well as its consumers.
WIPO pointed out that the Republic of Korea (South Korea) had “8,561 resident patent applications per unit of USD 100 billion GDP” and thus the “highest number of patents per unit of GDP” as in recent years, followed by China and Japan. South Korea also had the highest number of patents per population in 2018 (Indicators, p. 16). Such northeastern Asian countries’ technological and pragmatic values are pushing huge engines of economic growth.
Meanwhile, on the other hand, “the combined share of offices located in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania was 3.3% in 2018,” WIPO notes. The world still needs wide and deep change that can encourage fitting growth in the “Global South,” where so many of the world’s people live, pulled down by corruption, hurdles to education, and abuses. The indicators on this end call for entrepreneurial and just peacemakers, educators, enforcers, and collaborators.
Sources
World Intellectual Property Organization, “World Intellectual Property Indicators: Filings for Patents, Trademarks, Industrial Designs Reach Record Heights in 2018,” https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2019/article_0012.html, PR/2019/838, published October 16, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019.
WIPO, World Intellectual Property Indicators 2019, https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_941_2019.pdf, accessed October 23, 2019.
