The Standing Advisory Committee before the European Patent Office (SACEPO) Working Party on Rules met on October 14, 2021 via videoconference to discuss legal changes that will further enable the digitalization of the patent grant process and enhance data protection. Released by TIPO

Governments and enterprises in many parts of the world scaled up investments in innovation amid the massive human and economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Global Innovation Index 2021 showed, illustrating a growing acknowledgement that new ideas are critical for overcoming the pandemic and for ensuring post-pandemic economic growth. Global R&D spending in 2020 will show a different resilience than before. In particular, government funding budgets announced by developed economies show that global R&D expenditures will continue to maintain strong growth. Released by TIPO

On 30 July 2021, the Australian Federal Court found in Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879 that, for the purposes of the Patents Act 1990, an artificial intelligence (AI) could be named as an inventor on a patent application. This decision overturned an earlier decision of Australian Patents Office that only a natural human can be named as an inventor for an Australian patent. The Australian Patent Office has decided to appeal the Federal Court’s decision. Released by TIPO

The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) released news about the organizational restructuring. In order to prevent the leakage and infringement of key technologies related to the national industrial competitiveness, KIPO newly established the “Technology & Design Police Division”, equipped with Special Judicial Police (SJP), committed to preventing technology leakage and infringement to foster a fair market order. Released by TIPO

EPO released a statistics and trend analysis of global patent applications in the field of aerospace (cosmonautics) technology on July 21, 2021. The aerospace technology domain defined by this study is divided into 8 main domains and 41 sub-domains according to the ESA Technology Tree, which corresponds to the CPC patent classification number B64G. The statistical objects are patent families whose priority date is after 1990 (inclusive), totaling 11,649 worldwide (including 4,249 in Europe) Overall, the study yields the following key findings: There has been a steep worldwide increase in patenting filing in the past decade, A distinct growth in Chinese patent filings, for now are still filed mostly domestically, The patents related to aerospace technology are led by the United States, and European inventors

EPO launches a new statistics and trends centre to make the annual Patent Index interactive and fully explorable. Through a simple user interface, users can decide on their own the types of objects they want to analyze, such as the amount of applications or patents, and select the country they want to compare and/or statistics up to 35 technical fields. Then select one of the 4 chart types (bar chart, line chart, pie chart or horizontal bar chart) to display the graph. Released by TIPO