The global appetite for inventions and their money-making spin-offs has sparked
an explosion in patent applications, mainly in Asia and the United States, which
threatens to swamp the system responsible for dealing with them, experts have
warned.
According to the Inquirer.net, worldwide patent applications are growing at about 4.7 percent per year, according to the 2007 report of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), and the pace is even faster among Asian economic tigers such as China and South Korea.
Of the applications received by the European Patent Office (EPO), 30 percent are ruled out in the early stages of the research for "prior art" -- finding out if inventions are indeed new -- while nearly half of the remainder falls by the wayside later in the process.
However, Chinese competitors regularly take advantage of technical data published by patent offices to rush out copycat products. Since the technical details (of patent applications) are available online 18 months after a patent application has been filed, making it easy for an expert to understand and copy them.
Click here to read this interesting article on patents and its impact.
