Innovation – who can argue with that? If it promises to make our world a better place, it would rightly get a full show of hands. But patents, drafting patents, filing patents and prosecuting patents – what’s exciting about that? Are we likely to hear politicians explaining to their constituents with speeches about the need to patent important discoveries?
Yet without patent protection British industry will not secure the billions it needs to develop world beating technology.
Why?
Because anyone can copy, sell, and distribute such technology without meaningful patent protection.
But should this be so?
Especially when the discoverer of a pioneering technology will likely secure broad patent protection – but only if – ONLY IF, a patent is filed.
Take the recent story of a multibillion biotech business that made a huge impact on medicine and the diagnosis and treatment of patients: monoclonal antibodies. This technology was invented and pioneered in Britain but was not covered by a meaningful patent.
Thousands of jobs, billions in turnover, and hundreds of millions of dollar profits depend on this vital technology – yet only a small portion of this massive investment, and the jobs that went with it have ended up in Britain.
There are about four thousand issued patents on applications of monoclonal antibody technology in the USA, yet the crucial patent protecting this fantastic British invention never happened. The billions of dollars rolling in from the applications of monoclonal technology hardly benefit the UK.
Sadly, this tragic British story is repeated day in, day out, across the country.
The inventor of HTML, a British scientist working at CERN generously gave his invention to the world and from it came the World Wide Web, and the creation of behemoths like Google which pay very little tax to the UK Treasury and most of the jobs are not in the UK.
OK, so why does the UK not excel at filing meaningful patent protection?
I think the reason ‘runs deep’ – harkens back to the Victorian era when essentially Britain ruled the world with commercialization of innovation.
Big industrialists made lots of money, but something went wrong. They had the world beating technology, but the people were terribly exploited.Many in academia had difficulties with the notion of patenting intellectual property.
So this is where we have arrived at; as a society the UK remains largely ambivalent about patenting stuff.
On a government level we started handing out research grants that had no intrinsic interest or money set aside for patenting anything should anything of commercial interest come out of the research.
We became too benevolent for our own good. We forgot a basic rule: everyone needs a good job, and innovation and patents translate into good paying jobs and happy communities.
We have good employment protection laws now, 40 hour working weeks, holiday entitlements, no work-houses, no large scale, brutal exploitation.
But there’s a lot of catching up to do to reverse our ambivalence to patenting things.
There was a well known professor in a well known research based British university whose discoveries are behind an annual $50 billion world-wide commercial enterprise, and that was a conservative estimate some 10 years ago, with tens of thousands of jobs created instead all over the world for lack of filing decent patent protection.
“Somebody else can do that”, was the common refrain. Yes, they can – and many quality jobs are created, just not in the UK.
And so, what can the UK do to fix this patent dilemma?
We could start by looking at those American universities adept at obtaining valuable patents. Such universities typically have at least one full time professionally trained patent attorney and policies in place to encourage researchers to patent their discoveries and share in the rewards flowing from their discoveries.
So how can the UK go about boosting its patent registration? Here are some possible ways forward:
- 1. Introduce patent studies in schools preferably taught by outside patent counsel expert in the drafting and prosecution of patents.
- 2. Grants to ensure all universities and government laboratories have at least one full time professional patent attorney experienced in analyzing invention disclosures and converting them into patent applications.
- 3. All tax funded STEM research grants should include a hard budget to fund drafting and filing of patents.
- 4. National policy to ensure that inventors in all public funded research projects own at a minimum 30% of the intellectual property arising out of their patented discoveries.
These are just a few strategies which if implemented by a future UK government would go a long way to addressing the British patent shortfall.
Dr Christopher Wood is a patent attorney from the UK working for a patent law firm in Washington, DC.