New Patents & Designs Bill Extends Protection For Work

Executive Director of the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office (JIPO), Loreen Walker has said that the new Patents and Designs Bill now before Parliament will extend the term of a patent from 14 to 20 years.
However, while inventors were being allowed a longer period of protection for their work, the Bill now requires that they pay an annual fee to maintain the patent. This fee is not required under the existing law.
The current Patent Act, which dates back to 1857, is being amended to reflect current world standards in intellectual property (IP) rights. And, in addition to the new charge, inventors would be faced with an increase in existing fees, such as the application, examination and recording fees.
Miss Walker was speaking at a regional seminar on patents at the Knutsford Court hotel in Kingston recently. She pointed out that Jamaica had no option in updating its current Patent Law, as it did not meet the requirements of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property of 1883 and the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement of 1994.
“It goes without saying that our Patent Law is not TRIPS compliant. It is also not compliant with the bilateral agreement between Jamaica and the Government of the United States concerning the Protection and Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights,” Miss Walker said.
She added that a final draft of the Bill had been prepared and should be passed this calendar year.
The new law, when enforced, would simplify the procedure for obtaining a patent by allowing JIPO to manage and administer the process. Currently, an application for patent is sent through several channels within various government agencies before it is granted to the applicant.
In keeping with developing trends in international agreements, the Bill now proposes new requirements for the granting of patents. They include universal novelty and inventive steps. Explaining these requirements, Miss Walker said that under the current law, an invention needed to be a novelty in Jamaica alone. A requirement for universal novelty means that the invention should be novel worldwide. As such, Miss Walker observed that the search mechanism that was available under the Patent Corporation Treaty (PCT) was necessary.
However, Jamaica is not a party to the treaty until its patent laws have been updated.Commenting on ‘inventive step’, Miss Walker said, “the invention must show an advancement on the existing state of the technology”. According to her, there must be a noticeable technological step for a patent to be granted.
Additionally, for an invention to qualify for a patent, it needs to exhibit industrial applicability. This provision already exists in the old law.
The Patent Bill also introduced a list of non-patentable matters that were not a feature of the current law. As such, patents would not be granted to inventions that are contrary to public order or morality or would cause serious prejudice to the environment.
Other non-patentable matters include: discoveries of things that already exist in nature and mathematical methods or the formulation of abstract or scientific theories, which do not fulfil the requirement for industrial applicability.
Other provisions of the proposed bill include the matter of criminal offences in respect of patent rights; the ability to make a one-time application for patent that would be applicable in several countries under the PCT; the use of a patented invention by the Crown for certain circumstances, such as matters of public interest, including national security and national health and the ability to file a patent application electronically.