Letters and Comment

IP system isn’t working for small designers

As a lecturer in three dimensional design, I am in contact with many product designers and design students who have found that the IP system is just too expensive and unwieldy to protect the interests of budding designers. Without the substantial resources needed to pay patent agents and to file patents or design registrations nationally and internationally, designers are discouraged from undertaking lengthy development work and exposing their creations to the market. They are too aware that large manufacturers can copy their designs, and with a few minor amendments, market these innovations as their own.

It is those innovators who are not attached to large commercial concerns who suffer most. Consider the design student or independent designer who has an innovative idea or design. They must finance the development of their project and the launch of the product, or spend a considerable amount of time taking the product around to manufacturers. This takes up time they would otherwise spend on paid work. The addition of agents’ fees, searches and applications fees in different countries is a further burden that acts to deter the pursuit of their ideas and inventions. Even if they succeed, they face the prospect of having to spend large additional sums to fight any infringement of their patent. Sooner or later, as was my own experience, most have to give up the struggle.

Certainly there are success stories. But under the current IP system, large number of small businesses and individual designers will continue to be deterred from bringing to market new innovations and ideas – to the detriment of the wider community.

From Philip Hughes, Senior Lecturer in Three Dimensional Design, The Arts Institute at Bournemouth, UK

Patents and gender

Your article on the Global Women Inventors & Innovators Network (GWIIN: Championing Women in Mexico and Beyond, August 2006) asked: "with ever more women achieving success … might not organizations promoting women inventors have almost outlived their need?" The article went on to demonstrate that in Mexico women still file far fewer patent applications than men. But what happens in other countries?

I would like to draw your attention to the recent research on gender differences in patenting in the U.S., published in the August 4 edition of Science Magazine*. A...