When new trade deals are penned, clauses relating to intellectual property (IP) can receive attention ranging from absolutely none to furious protests in the streets of Auckland.
The recent signing of the RCEP has received relatively little coverage (compared to the furore caused by the TPP negotiations), likely due to other topics being higher on media's priority list. We, in any case, carefully considered the provisions relating to patents and designs that have now been signed by a third of the world economy, and four topics have caught our attention.
Patentable Subject Matter
Whether inventive activity in some modern fields of technology, particularly in computer-implemented fields, is patentable has been a matter of much contention in Australia with increasing numbers of Patent Office decisions being appealed. In this context, the RCEP's simplicity in defining what “patents shall be available for” makes a sharp contrast:
