We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
Trilateral cooperation
In the last quarter of the twentieth century three patent offices, often referred to as the Trilateral Offices, received the bulk of patent applications and issued most of the world's patents: the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Japanese Patent Office (JPO). Of the 5.5 million patents in force at the end of 2004, 83% were in force in the US, Japan and the member countries of the European Patent Convention (EPC). Two other offices have because of their large number of filings joined this first tier of patent offices – the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) and the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) of China.
The Trilateral story is one of informal cooperation that becomes grounded in a bilateral memorandum of understanding between the USPTO and the EPO in June 1982 and another between the USPTO and the JPO in 1983, followed by a memorandum amongst all three in 1983. What accounts for this deepening of international cooperation given, as we saw in Chapter 3, that the patent institution has been important to the trade and protectionist policies of states? The explanation hinges on two factors – the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in the system as demanders of patent office cooperation and the workload problems facing the Trilaterals.
TNCs, the biggest users of the patent system, want a world in which at a moment of their choosing they can obtain high-quality patents at low cost.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
