• New Patent Law
• High-quality services from the SPTO
• SPTO on the move
• 8th meeting of the Joint Spanish-Moroccan Committee on IP
• SPTO includes more than 93,000 Spanish industrial designs in the WIPO database

SPTO on the move

From 31 August to 3 September, the '23rd Seminar on Industrial Property for Latin American Countries' was held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). It was organised by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the Brazilian National Institute for Industrial Property (INPI) and targeted the staff of Latin American national offices. The Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (SPTO) was invited to participate in the seminar to give two talks on the various collaboration programmes it carries out in Latin America in the field of Industrial Property and on how these are financed.

Also in Rio, on 4 September a seminar was held on “International Technology – Licences and Conflict Resolution in IP”, organised by the Forum Nacional de Gestores de Inovaçao e Transferência de Tecnologia (FORTEC), the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, INPI-Brazil and WIPO. The SPTO participated in a session entitled “IP contracts in the Technology Transfer chain”, in which it explained Spain’s experience with contracts of this type.

Visit to Colombia and Ecuador
19 to 22 May were the dates for the '6th Regional Seminar on the management of Industrial Property Offices in Latin America – the role of shared work programmes' held in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) and organised by the Spanish International Development Cooperation Agency (AECID), the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office and WIPO, as part of the Latin American Programme for Specialised Technical Training. The main focus of the course were the services provided to users by offices from the time of filing an application until granting, with the stress placed on creating mechanisms for cooperation in order to improve the skills of patent management staff, and on quality indicators to analyse the procedures involved.

The overall aim was to improve patent and quality management as well as sharing mechanisms and to achieve efficient use of information on patents among examiners in different offices and organisations. How work is planned in the Industrial Property offices in Latin America was also studied.

In addition, the SPTO, together with the Ecuadorian Institute for Intellectual Property, cooperated with WIPO on the organisation of the “Regional Seminar on the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and the Budapest Treaty”, this year in its seventeenth edition. The aim was to promote the sharing of experiences among participating countries, and to work on the most recent changes in PCT and how it can be used in the process of globalisation as an effective tool for protecting inventions, for companies, for universities and for public research centres. Contributions by participants from the different countries included a presentation by the President of the Spanish Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).

This year and for the first time, a day was set aside to study the Budapest Treaty on the international recognition of the deposit of micro-organisms for the purposes of patent procedure. An explanation was given of the work done by an international deposit authority in Spain and of the experience acquired by the industry.