The Uruguayan Goverment Receives a Great Amount of Patent and Trademark Applications

The minister of Industry, Kreimerman, stated it is fundamental to increase the budget and hire new professionals because the amount of registration applications has been growing explosively. He also added “industrial property is an important component inside intellectual property that has as its principal objective to protect an invention with the purpose of contributing or promote innovation”.

The principal sources of intellectual property are the patents, trademarks, author rights, breeder rights (agricultural), geographical indications (origin) and industrial designs.

The minister informed that in Uruguay, patents, trademarks and industrial designs have been growing compared to the last two years where there were a dozen applications per month. This is the principal reason why they wanted to reinforce the National Direction of Industrial Property (DNIP) in order to be capable of studying in detail all these trademarks and patents, checking if there are similar products registered and also to prove they show a high originality.

Kreimerman added they aim to increase the efficiency of the procedures involving trademarks and patents through an organizational redesign, the addition of new professionals as chemists, lawyers, etc. that will help to decrease the application approval timing.

He pointed out that this is happening all around the world because there are international companies that proceed to present many applications at once in order to save time. In general, every country grants a patent for a 20-year period, but then these companies present patent applications for derivatives of their products. This permits extension of the patent validity and it is known as “patent clouds” or “chained patents”.

“The Uruguayan situation is that it is a country that has productive specialization in a few fields and low technology; this is why there is not much development in the trademark and patents system” Kreimerman revealed. Those chains that have a high amount of patent requests are the IT, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

There are other changes that the DNPI plans to execute such as starting information services regarding technology and advice in intellectual property for public and private institutions. This is why a law project was sent to the Parliament for the creation of the Uruguayan Centre of Industrial Property.

This centre will also control and know with certainty what products are already patented and help to establish negotiation between companies and obtain information to develop new products.

Furthermore, to make the process easier, the DNPI is launching some initiatives in order to make it easier for the companies by offering some online registering procedures.