Related and recent: In Just a Few Years China Became the Eastern District of Texas

Summary: Misconceptions (or deliberate propaganda) about patent policy in the east poison the debate and derail a serious, facts-based discussion about it

TECHRIGHTS is generally focused on the EPO and USPTO, not only because they account for the lion's share of capital but also because English is their official language and it's close to us (we're based in the UK, the servers are in the US, and many volunteers/community members are in the US).

"India generally recognises -- as many patent examiners do as well -- that patent quality is what matters and economic justification is needed for any patent."We sometimes look at smaller patent offices and also look eastwards. Over the weekend we wrote about IP Australia in relation to Grant Shoebridge's article; he and the firm he works for must be paying to repost it in more sites, basically lobbying for expansion of patent scope because IP Australia sought to improve productivity by narrowing the scope of patents.

Further north there are three major patent offices, all part of IP5: Japan's JPO, Korea's KIPO and China's SIPO (the "Five IP Offices" (IP5) are JPO/EPO/KIPO/SIPO/USPTO).

Benjamin Henrion has just (late on Monday) pointed out this paper titled "The Japanese Software Industry: What Went Wrong and What Can We Learn from It?".

"Software patents as metric fails to take in account the majority of software companies that do not have patents," Henrion correctly noted. I responded with:

Simplest way to rebut this BS 'paper'... Hypothesis: software patents good for software industry Falsified by: 1) India banned software patents 2) China allows them (one of the few countries) Which one is a software powerhouse?

We actually brought up this point less than one week ago. It needs to be repeated as much as possible because we continue to see lies repeated about China's patent policy against India's. They get it all backwards. Maybe it's intentional and therefore disingenuous. Less than a day ago (Watchtroll's Steve Brachmann on Monday and then IP Kat as well) patent maximalists carried on with their glorification of China [1, 2] in the context of so-called 'IP'. They try to make China some kind of 'role model', never mind if it's India that's thriving in the software sector, owing in part to the ban on software patents in India. An Indian patent maximalism blog has just published this "Weekly Patent News" post. Under "Indian Patent Statistics" it says:

A total of 1003 patent applications have been published in the 16th issue of the patent journal marking a modest increase of about 13.07% in the total number of patent applications published. Out of the 1003 applications, 55 applications account for early publications while 948 applications account for ordinary publications or publications occurring after the 18 month period. A total of 231 applications have been granted this week as opposed 176 grants in the previous.

Notice the absolute numbers. Also remember that India is not in IP5. India generally recognises -- as many patent examiners do as well -- that patent quality is what matters and economic justification is needed for any patent. Just throwing millions of low-quality patents into a repository (like China does with SIPO) isn't indicative of "success"; it's just a self-fulfilling prophecy that's hinged on lies like "patents are innovation" and "innovation depends on patents" (coming around full circle). ⬆