The plenary was attended by the Brazilian Minister of Economy Paulo Guedes, economist Ricardo Amorim; the BPTO’s President Cláudio Vilar Furtado, the regional director of the WIPO office in Brazil José Graça Aranha and Erika Diniz, ABPI’s executive director. The president of ABPI, Luiz Edgard Montaury Pimenta, opened the works of the 41st International Congress on Intellectual Property, the largest event of its kind in Latin America.
In a brief speech, in which he greeted those present, he quoted an open letter signed by the ABPI defending the BPTO’s financial autonomy “Only with autonomy over the resources it generates, can the BPTO modernize itself, invest in technology, infrastructure and gain efficiency comparable to the best patent offices in the world”, he stated, acknowledging the institute’s efforts to overcome its difficulties, but with the caveat that the system still presents an excessive delay in the time of patent examinations compared to other international offices.
