Amendment to the Patent Law—Animal/Plant Invention Patent and Export Compulsory License for Pharmaceuticals.

To actualize the Doha Round Declaration on the “TRIPS Agreement and Public Health” adopted by the WTO conference in 2001 and conform to the policy of invention patent for animal/plant biotechnology as framed by the Council of Agriculture, the Executive Yuan, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) will promote another amendment to the Patent Law mainly on the issues of export compulsory license for pharmaceuticals, invention patent for animal/plant biotechnology, and simplification of administrative remedy procedure.

 

Pursuant to “Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health”, WTO member countries with insufficient pharmaceutical production capacity will be able to legally import from abroad the low-priced patented medicines when afflicted by extremely national crisis resulting from public health diseases, such as, HIV/ADIS, tuberculosis, malaria, or other major epidemics. Since the Patent Law in regard to compulsory license in Taiwan is limited to domestic demand only, the amendment will grant compulsory license for export of medicines thereafter to comply with TRIPS provisions.

 

Meanwhile, to cope with the policy of granting invention patent for animal/plant biotechnology as formulated by the Council of Agriculture and to encourage research and innovation in the country, this amendment will begin to grant animal/plant invention patent, thus stimulating relevant patent research on animal and plants and initiating new business opportunities. To this end, IPO states that related measures will be formulated in the meantime to cushion the impact on the peasantry. Besides, due to the planned establishment of “Intellectual Property Court”, a court dedicated to IPR cases, by the Judicial Yuan, this amendment will simplify current patent/trademark administrative remedy system and thus have relevant cases tried by the Intellectual Property Court. (2004.12)

CYJ/CCS