jbond197
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Feb 28, 2010
- Messages
- 7,300
- Reaction score
- -20
- Country
- Location
Chinese patent problems
An interesting read...
An interesting read...
Here’s a chart posted a couple of weeks ago by economist Mark Perry, based on data from different regions’ patent offices and collected by the World Intellectual Property Organization:
In addition to wondering about potential methodological differences in the patent process across countries, we question how much, if anything, this information actually tells us about genuinely innovative activity in China. (Which we would distinguish from more broadly-defined entrepreneurial activity like, say, starting a business.)
Perry, for one, seems enthusiastic:
And towards the end of last year, Thomson Reuters gave the Chinese patent boom an enthusiastic gloss in a long report, going so far as to breathlessly say that “it is clear that China will soon reach another superlative as the world’s top innovator. … Never before in history has such a concentrated culture of innovation grown so quickly and with such unity of purpose.”
We’re not buying it.
This correspondent is no expert on international patent comparisons, but we suspect that these data mostly just tell the typical story of China’s rise up the technology value-chain and its use of industrial policy to accelerate growth on the back of already-existing technologies.
In other words, the huge amounts of state-driven R&D and the push out of agriculture and industry into technology in recent years will certainly lead to more patents and more enterprising activity, but that’s different from arguing that China will become a big driver of inventions that meaningfully expand the frontiers of innovation.
Here’s a paragraph from the Reuters report that was seemingly ignored in the report’s conclusion, but which we would emphasise (we found and inserted the links ourselves):
“Utility model patents” are awarded to new ideas applied to already-existing products. And if you read the FT article cited above, it’s clear these patents are historically quite easy to obtain — or in the words of the legal expert cited in the article, as of mid-2008 “you could patent a wheel in China, and get it through”.
That was three years ago and the patent laws have since allegedly been tweaked; yet the number of these patents continues to increase and there now appears to be roughly the same quantity of these utility patents granted annually in China as proper invention patents (click to expand):
And that’s before we discuss the quality of the invention patents themselves.
The usefulness of patent grants as a measure of innovation in the US is, we think, becoming increasingly dubious — and if anything, they might even be more accurately understood as a kind of incumbent protectionism (a subject for another time). There’s certainly no reason to think it’s any more useful in China, where the laws governing intellectual property are young and will doubtless continue to evolve.
——
Relatedly, a hat tip to our colleagues at Beyond Brics for linking to the very funny story of these expats in Kunming, China who came across three fake Apple Stores in walking distance of each other. The ripoffs are impressive indeed, and in one of these stores, the expats “struck up some conversation with these salespeople who, hand to God, all genuinely think they work for Apple.” Beyond Brics writes:
Or that Apple doesn’t know how to spell:
