ACIP Innovation Patents final report

The Advisory Council on Intellectual Property (ACIP) has released its final report on the innovation patent scheme. For those who don’t remember, the review has been ongoing for over three years, and we made our first submission in late 2011 (incidentally the first review I contributed to as a member!). Since then we’ve written a second submission and I represented the Pirate Party at a roundtable discussion in Sydney. The innovation patent is a lesser form of patent that operates much the same but requires less inventiveness, and offers less protection.

I’m yet to read the full report, but there appear to be some promising recommendations (starting on page 6, 13 of the PDF). Recommendation 2 is to raise the threshold for inventiveness higher than where it is, but still be lower than that of a standard patent. Recommendation 3 is for the mandatory examination of innovation patents before the third anniversary of the application. This should provide more certainty. Other recommendations are mostly administrative and clear up some vague terminology.

It’s available from here http://www.acip.gov.au/reviews/all-reviews/review-innovation-patent-system/