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Patent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.

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Tuesday, January 18, 2005

IP Protection & Awareness in Europe deserves to be improved.

From the

Innobarometer 2004:

"[...] - The vast majority of innovative enterprises have not taken steps to protect their invention through patenting or trademark registration -

Only a small minority of innovative enterprises in the EU have taken measures to protect their intellectual property through patenting or the registration of international trademarks.

As the graph below shows only 12% of firms interviewed have applied for a patent and only 14% have actually registered one or more international trademarks. Given the high proportion of enterprises confirming that they have introduced new products or services, this result is somewhat surprising. This could be explained by the irrelevance of patents for firms in the service sector but we could nevertheless wonder if certain firms are receiving an adequate financial award for their invention as the vast majority have not even requested the licence for exclusive rights to sell their innovative product. [...]"

Furthermore, there is another interesting statement:

"[...] The typology breakdown shows that the 'successful, innovative' group can be singled out for the relatively higher proportions of enterprises which have applied for a patent (41%) and those which have registered one or more international trademarks (46%) compared to the respective average results for the European Union. [...]"

Perhaps the anti-patent campaigners of

FFII e.V. might take notice thereof. More IP, more success. Or vice versa.

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