INPI hosts meeting with China, India, South Africa e Russia

17/06/2015    16:34h

On June 10 and 11, INPI hosted the 4th Meeting of the Presidents of Intellectual Property Institutes (IP) of the BRICS countries. The technical meeting was attended by the highest authorities of the China Patent Office (CNIPA) and the intellectual property offices of Russia (ROSPATENT), India (IPO) and South Africa (ICPC), in a total of 18 delegates.

During the 4th IP-BRICS Meeting, the institutes provided updated information on the structure, statistics, recent and strategic developments, as well as on their future programs, and agreed that cooperation under this scope would be carried out in a gradual manner, in accordance with the capacity of each office and in order to achieve feasible results.

As a result of the meeting, the authorities of the IP institutes defined the areas of cooperation to be explored by the group. These will be activities covering the training of examiners, the dissemination of IP and the exchange of IP practices and technical information.

The organization of the event was the last task of INPI at the head of the pro tempore presidency of IP BRICS (2014/2015). At the end of the meeting, the coordination of thegroup was officially transmitted to the Russian IP Office (ROSPATENT), which will be active during the 2015/2016 biennium.

In this context, the BRICS IP institutes initiated negotiations aimed at establishing a basis for technical cooperation (known as IP-BRICS). To this end, they have organized formal face-to-face meetings, the first of which took place in Magaliesburg, South Africa in May 2013, and two others on the margins of the General Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva in the years of 2013 and 2014. As a result of these meetings, a program of cooperation activities (roadmap) of mutual interest was established. Focal points were also indicated in each institute and a management format was adopted through alternating pro tempore presidencies, which follow the order of the countries in the BRICS.