Two major improvements in the industrial property area in Brazil
The sorely tried Brazilian people are really not spoilt with good news. Foreign investors are well aware of the hurdles of Brazilian bureaucracy. So all the more welcome then are some good news for a change! These two improvements relate to the area of industrial property, i.e., such matters as patents and trademarks:
Patents
The National Institute for Industrial Property (INPI) in Rio de Janeiro is the so-called "Brazilian Patent Office" which primarily handles patent, trademark and design applications. It receives about 30,000 patent applications per year, and about 80 percent of these come from abroad. Moreover, the INPI receives about 180,000 trademark applications per year, and here the origin is the contrary: The vast majority is filed by Brazilian entities. The main task of the INPI is to substantively examine these applications, to see if they fulfill the criteria of patentability or registrability.
Over the years, the INPI has simply not been able to keep track of all incoming applications, in particular for patent applications. The result has become a huge accumulation of pending applications (the so-called backlog), waiting for their turn to be examined. The applicants have had to wait for about 10-14 years, depending on the technical field, for the first office action by the INPI. About 230.000 applications were collecting dust. The situation was getting so out of control that several foreign companies simply stopped filing patent applications in Brazil, simply because "you file and nothing happens".
Well, there are now some refreshing signs that the situation is finally improving.
Since about two years, the INPI has been sending out to all applicants a standard office action, asking the applicant to present the examination results from other countries which have examined the same invention, and to restrict the requested scope of patent protection (the patent claims) in accordance with the closest known technology.
Most applicants obey this request and then the INPI usually grants a patent without raising any objections. Thanks to this new routine, you can already notice that the backlog is diminishing. Nowadays, you often get a grant after some 8-9 years, which means a great improvement! Up to now, this procedure has been more on a probationary basis, but it has worked out so well that at the beginning of July this year, it was officially sanctioned by the Federal Government.
Trademarks
Presently for Brazilians, it is slow and costly to file trademark applications around the world, because with few exceptions, they have to file a separate application for each country in which they want to register their trademark. And for foreigners wanting to file in Brazil, those have to file one or even several separate Brazilian applications. This is now going to change, because Brazil has just ratified the so-called Madrid Protocol, resulting in a win-win situation: From October 2019, it will become easier and less costly for foreigners living in a member country of the Madrid Protocol to file trademark applications in Brazil, and it will be easier for Brazilians to file trademark applications in these M.P. countries. By one sole application you can presently cover more than 100 countries, among which are all the major ones, such as the US, most European countries, Russia, China, India, Japan, etc.
Nordic Light Magazine. September - December 2019 (Page 42).
Read at: http://www.swedcham.com.br/publico/nordic-light/Nordic-Light-Set2019-Dec2019.pdf