By Bandula Sirimanna
With just one examiner amidst other limited resources, Sri Lanka’s National Intellectual Property Office is entrusted with granting a patent or registering a trademark, completing heavy documentation manually as well as Internet searches.
Due to this complex process, a long period is required to grant a patent and to register a trade mark. ‘We are not purposely delaying the granting of patents to inventors, but the process of issuing patents is time consuming because it has to be one hundred percent perfect,” said Dr. D.M. Karunaratna, Director General of the National Intellectual Property Office of Sri Lanka in an interview with the Business Times.
He said he has extensive experience in the areas of constitutional matters, human rights, writs, international law and intellectual property law. So far 40 patents have been granted by considering 460 applications and 902 trademarks registered out of 6,244 applications last year.
Responding to inventors complaints of taking long time to grant patents and register trademarks, Dr, Karunaratne said that patents are granted after a thorough examination of the claimed invention. It is also gazetted before approval and three months time for objections is given after the gazette is issued. The process itself takes a long time.
This procedure across the world is the same. In the process of examination, the applicant is also sometimes required to amend the specification.
He mentioned that many specifications submitted with the application are defective and need corrective measures. “If we grant a patent without proper examination (at least on the data available to the examiners), such patent will cover existing technology,” he said. Such patent will disturb the current users of the particular technology and their genuine business. This process is applicable to all types of inventions, pharmaceutical or otherwise, he added. Moreover, the delays can be caused by some other reasons such as extensive workload.
“However, we expedite applications on priority basis if the applicant makes a request with a valid reason for early examination. “We always do our best to meet the needs of the applicants.
They can meet me at any time in the office and seek assistance even without prior appointments. It happens every day,” Dr. Karunaratne said.
“We had two examiners earlier but at present we are depending on one examiner. They have been trained in the examination of inventions. They can do examinations reasonably depending on the available data.
They do their best. But they are not equipped to meet the needs of all the areas of technology. We cannot compare them with the examiners of the US Patent Office or similar IP Offices. As a developing country we have our own challenges and limitations,” he said. “Our facilities are comparatively bare. It is not fair to compare the offices such as the US and UK with those of Sri Lanka or of the countries of the level of development similar to Sri Lanka. We do our best. We can also develop our system to meet the needs of the country over the time. We are in the process of filing the existing vacancies. Then, we shall be in a better position to serve the inventors better,” he added.
Patents are granted for inventions by the National Intellectual Property Office with exclusive rights for a period of 20 years in accordance with the Intellectual Property Act No.36 of 2003 and the regulations made there under. Invention according to the Act is, “an idea of an inventor which permits in practice the solution to a specific problem in the field of technology”. An invention is patentable,” if it is new, involves an inventive step and is industrially applicable” but at the same time the Act does not make provisions for every invention to be patentable, he said. |
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