UK Patent Office To Change Name In April

by Robin Pilgrim, LawAndTax-News.com, London

13 March 2007

The UK Patent Office has confirmed that as of April 2, it will be changing its name to the UK Intellectual Property Office. This change was recommended in the Gowers Report, published on 6 December 2006.

Commenting on the move, Patent Office Chief Executive, Ron Marchant explained that:

"We have been called The Patent Office for many years. During this time, businesses built upon other forms of 'intellectual property', such as copyright, trade marks and designs, have often commented that the name does not reflect all our responsibilities. This has caused confusion over who is responsible for these other rights, and also how important we and the Government consider those rights to be."

"All forms of intellectual property are important for successful and competitive UK businesses. This is reflected in the range of recommendations made in the Gowers report."

He continued:

"The report’s main recommendations will help us to enforce intellectual property rights, and support British businesses both at home and abroad. These are issues we began to deal with in our own reform programme, 'Patent Office for the 21st Century'. So it is even more appropriate that these matters will be included in our corporate plan when we become the UK Intellectual Property Office."

"A number of changes need to be made to the law, but this does not prevent us from using our new name. To avoid any doubt we will use the words 'UK Intellectual Property Office is an operating name of the Patent Office' on our material until the legal changes have been made."

In addition, the Patent Office will be revising its role in the following areas, following Gowers Report recommendations:

• Advice for UK Businesses as they seek to obtain and protect their rights both domestically and in other countries;
• Fast track rights processing;
• Seeking to make progress on European and Community Patent proposals;
• Continuing to improve patent quality;
• Working with other Patent Offices, particularly the US and Japan, to make multinational patent processing simpler;
• Creating a better match between fees and the costs of the services covered by them; and
• Raising public awareness of the wider impact of IP crime.

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