Brunei patent office: Is it in the works?

BRUNEI needs to begin studying its options of setting up a patent and trademark office to help improve the country's reputation in protecting intellectual property rights (IPR), an expert said yesterday.

The establishment of a patent office and ensuring that it is manned by people with the necessary qualifications and training, however, can take years, said Jennie Ness, regional Southeast Asia Attache from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The easiest step to take towards starting a patenting office would be to outsource patent examinations to other countries, she said.

"There are countries in Southeast Asia that are smaller and have the compact land mass that Brunei has (and they have) decided that they are going to have a patent office but they are not going to examine the patents themselves in the office but rely on other offices around the world," said Ness. There are offices in Australia, Korea, Japan, the US and many other offices around the world that can do the practical search.

"This means that you use less of your government's resources by performing that function and the government becomes the interpreter of the law when it comes to patents and doesn't get bogged down in the long process of searching internationally.

"So if Brunei wants to set up a filing office, where you can go to as a one-stop patenting office, this could happen very quickly," said Ness when asked about how long it would take to set up such an operation.

"It's just a matter of joining some treaties or working with a couple of other offices," she explained.

Some of the things that would need to be considered in who to partner with include determining who offers their services at a "price that works" and has the capacity in terms of technology and human resources to take on applications from Brunei Darussalam.

Should Brunei Darussalam decide to set up its own patent office and carry out its domestic patent examination, Ness said this would take longer mainly due to the required human resources.

"It's going to take longer because you've got to train. Every patent examiner in the US comes into the US Patent and Trademark Office with either a bachelor of science or a bachelor degree in engineering and science, and immediately goes into eight months of training full time," she said.

"We've got a 10,000-person office, where there are a lot of experiments and (the office) has been around since the 1780s. If it was Brunei's choice to do that, then training and education is going to take a very long time, and you're going to need a lot of assistance from around the world to figure out how to do that," she said.

"I tend to believe that the Southeast Asian market would be better off with a common Asean patent system, but I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon," said Ness.

IPR violations are among factors that turn off big companies from locating their projects in a prospect host country. Companies that spend heavily on research and technology are particular about IPR protection. The Brunei Times