Official: U.S. Needs Europe's Help on Patent Protection
NOVEMBER 22, 2011, 11:28 A.M. ET
By FRANCES ROBINSON
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BRUSSELS—U.S. companies are encountering "serious difficulties" when trying to enforce their patents in China, the White House's intellectual-property czar said Tuesday, calling for the U.S. and the European Union to work together to combat the issue.
"It's a complicated problem, not just because of our overall economic relationship with China, but because the scope of the concerns we have with China are so broad," Victoria Espinel said in an interview. "From our perspective in the U.S., it is enormously helpful to be cooperating in Europe in terms of how we approach those issues with China."
Addressing this problem would also set a precedent for future dealings on patents with India, she added.
Ms. Espinel said the implementation of the America Invents Act, the first comprehensive overhaul of U.S. patent law since the 1950s, will go some way toward resolving disputes over patents. The act will fundamentally change the way in which inventors and companies receive patents. She said the changes, which President Barack Obama signed into law in September, will ensure that patents are of a higher quality.
"Clearly the patent system in the U.S. has become one that is litigious, that is complicated," she said at the permanent representation of the German state of Bavaria to the EU.
"As an administration one of the things we're looking at is to decrease the need for the amount of litigation that's going on as it's not efficient for any of these companies to be engaged in it," she said when asked about legal battles in several countries world-wide between technology giants such as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
Ms. Espinel added that a voluntary project that was set up earlier this year to tackle piracy and trademark counterfeiting around online payments will likely be reviewed early next year. Mastercard Inc., Visa Inc., American Express Co., Paypal and Discover are all involved in the project.
"We are going to do a review of the credit-cards project at the end of this year, or probably realistically at the beginning of next year to see how it is going," Ms. Espinel said. "Our informal understanding is that is already having an impact, but it's quite hard to understand what that impact is."
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