On July 14th, during the 6th IP Meeting, a virtual event promoted by ABPI and WIPO – World Intellectual Property Organization, jointly, in this edition, with the BPTO – Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office and CNI (National Confederation of Industry), Fabiano Barreto, the specialist in Policies and Industry of CNI considered that the current intellectual property system will have to adjust to the requirements imposed by technologies 4.0. He discussed the topic “Intellectual Property 4.0: IP in the Fourth Industrial Revolution”, alongside Alexandre Pfeifer, the business development executive in Intellectual Property at IBM Research Rio de Janeiro, mediated by Vagner Latsch, general coordinator of the Patent Board at the BPTO. In addition to Barreto, ABPI’s president Luiz Edgard Montaury Pimenta, the regional director of WIPO in Brazil, José Graça Aranha, and Claudio Furtado, president of the BPTO also joined in the opening table.
The CNI expert noted that, with the reduction of patent applications pending examination, the backlog, the BPTO will have to update itself technologically and handle patent examinations of products with an increasingly shorter market life cycle. He suggested an interaction, in the future, between examiners of the institute and industry technicians, which would result in more qualified exams accomplished in less time. “Everyone wins”, he said. Barreto also considered that the current patent system may not account for the technological diversity arising from the industry 4.0 environment. “It will be difficult to fit increasingly different technologies into a single global patent system”, he stated. “We may have to think about new types of sui generis protection”.
Pfeifer, in turn, described the activities developed by IBM, highlighting the company’s long tradition in Intellectual Property. According to him, since its creation in 1920, IBM has filed more than 140 thousand patent applications. Last year alone, there were 9,200 patents, 800 of which in the field of Artificial Intelligence. “At IBM, Intellectual Property is a business”, he explained, adding that the company not only develops new technologies but licenses and sells and even acquires patents from third parties. The company’s new patentable technologies are developed through a worldwide network, in which a group of the Brazilian subsidiary participates.
The full event is available on ABPI’s YouTube Channel.
