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After two years on top of Australian patent filing charts – including a remarkable (by Australian standards) 435 applications in 2020 – Chinese telecommunications manufacturer OPPO dropped back to third position in 2021.  The top spot was taken by last year’s runner-up, South Korea’s LG Electronics, which filed 251 new Australian standard patent applications, up from 236 in 2020.  China’s Huawei Technologies took second place, with 243 new applications, also increasing its filings, up from 229 in 2020.  Huawei now owns nearly 1,300 live Australian patents and applications, which is a significant investment for a company that is effectively barred from the Australian market.  It is likely, however, that many of these patents and applications cover standardised mobile and data communications technologies that are implemented across the industry, and which therefore provide Huawei with a substantial stream of licensing income.

The top Australian resident applicant, once again, was electronic gaming system developer Aristocrat Technologies.  However, from a peak of 252 applications filed in 2018, Aristocrat’s filings have declined significantly.  It filed only 72 new standard patent applications in 2021, falling to equal 21^st place in the annual ranking (alongside the University of Texas System).  Over the same period, Aristocrat has been engaged in a Federal Court battle with the Australian Patent Office in an effort to establish the patent-eligibility of many of its gaming-related inventions, recently suffering a setback in the form of a loss on appeal to a Full Bench of the Court.

The leading antipodean applicant is now New Zealand’s Fisher & Paykel Healthcare (which is separate these days from the well-known maker of home appliances).  Fisher & Paykel Healthcare filed 127 Australian standard patent applications in 2021, up from 94 the previous year, to take 7^th place in the rankings.  Ironically, the leading filer of New Zealand patent applications in 2021 was Australian medical device manufacturer Resmed, with 142 filings, while Fisher & Paykel Healthcare appears to have no interest in patent protection in its domestic market.  Meanwhile, Resmed followed the opposite trans-Tasman strategy, filing just 25 applications in its home market of Australia.

No other Australian (or New Zealand) applicant appeared in the top 30 filers for 2021.  The next highest Australian applicant, after Aristocrat, was the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), with 48 applications, followed by NewSouth Innovations (the University of New South Wales’ commercialisation arm) on 29.  The Australian top five was rounded out by Breville (26) and Resmed (25).

The top three filers of provisional applications were CSIRO (56), Resmed (51), and NewSouth Innovations (47).

Innovation patent filings were dominated, in the final few months of full operation of the system, by Chinese and Indian applicants, of which the top two were China’s Qingdao Agricultural University, and the delightfully-named Lovely Professional University in India.  The leading ‘credible’ filers of innovation patent applications in 2021 were US-based Calerpillar Inc (31 filings), agricultural chemical developer Imtrade Australia (26 filings), and Australian radio technology company Benelec (14 filings).

Read on for full tables of the leading filers for each application type.

Read more »

The number of standard patent applications filed in Australia exceeded 30,000 for the first time in 2021, increasing by nearly 3.6% over the previous year, and following on from two successive years of decline.  Growth was driven primarily by direct national filings, with PCT national phase entry (NPE) filings up by less than 1% on 2020.  Standard application filings by Australian residents experienced particularly strong growth, increasing by 21% over 2020 numbers, while applications by foreign residents grew by just 2%.

At first blush this looks like good news for Australian applicants, and thus for innovation in Australia.  But the headline figures conceal a distorting influence on filing behaviour in 2021, namely the phasing out of the innovation patent system.  It was entirely predictable that thousands of new innovation patent applications would be filed in the weeks leading up to the final deadline of 25 August 2021.  What might have been less obvious is that the beginning-of-the-end of the innovation patent system would also lead to a spike in filings of new standard patent applications.  Australian residents, in particular, filed more than six times as many direct standard applications in August 2021 as compared with a ‘normal’ month, accounting for a majority of the overall growth in resident filings for the year.  All of these applications with a filing date on or before 25 August 2021 are able to provide a basis for future divisional innovation patent filings, for as long as they remain pending, and up to the final expiry date of the innovation patent system on 25 August 2029.

The down side of this boost in Australian resident filings, assuming that they indeed represent applications brought forward to beat the innovation patent deadline, is that we should expect to see a corresponding decline in the coming 12 months, just as we did following introduction of the Raising the Bar patent reforms in 2013.

Provisional filings suffered a further decline – the largest since 2013 – of nearly 12%.  No doubt this can also be attributed at least partly to the phase out of the innovation patent system, with some applicants electing to file an innovation or standard application directly, prior to 26 August 2021, rather than file a provisional application as a basis for a future priority claim.  The 2013 drop in provisional filings was similarly influenced by a desire to get a standard patent application into the system, and request examination, prior to commencement of the Raising the Bar patent law reforms.  But even accounting for these disruptions, provisional filings have been in a general decline for many years, and 2021 looks to be a continuation of that trend.  Provisional applications are filed almost exclusively by Australian residents, so this is not a good sign for the state of innovation and IP protection in Australia.

In a surprising turn of events, the growth in standard filings by Chinese applicants did not continue in 2021.  Following a number of consecutive years of significant growth, I had previously predicted that 2021 could be the year in which filings by Chinese applicants surpassed those of Australian residents.  But the jump in Australian filings combined with a 7% decline in filings from China to defeat that expectation.  (For now.)

Australians have therefore remained the second largest users of their own patent system, with US residents once again being overwhelmingly the top filers.  Standard applications from the US increased by nearly 5% in 2021, following a 1.6% decline in 2020.  The other members of the top five countries of origin – China, Japan, and Germany – all experienced declines in 2021.

But enough with the summary – let’s look at some charts and tables!

Read more »

As the novel coronavirus epidemic continues to spread across the globe, WTR provides an updated look at measures that national IP offices have launched in response.

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