Harmonization of Patent Laws - Is It the Need of the Hour?

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Why all this noise about harmonization? Especially after United States of America agreed on going the ‘first inventor to file’ way moving away from the earlier ‘first inventor’ approach, upon which it had been successfully functioning for over a century! We are seeing a world today where information, trade and commerce understands no boundaries and inventors seek a patent system of transcendental nature spanning across nations to reach out to the international markets. In such an environment, a call for harmonization of the patent laws and systems across countries world-over is inescapable as well as imperative. What is sought is a coherent, cost-effective and more expeditious system of patent law which will enable inventors to obtain clear and reliable patent rights in multiple jurisdictions. With the IP system we have in place today thriving with diversities, innovators and patent offices around the world have to repeat the same work, time and time again, ultimately wasting precious resources of the nation, increasing pendency counts of the patent applications lying at the patent offices and reducing the value of the invention due to this delay. Also different patentability standards lead to the disparity of inventions which are granted in one country and rejected in another, for example on one side of the spectrum US says ‘anything under the sun that is made by man’ is patentable whereas on the other end we have India saying inventions related to atomic energy are not even patentable subject matter! In devising a ‘gold standard’ IP system, as David Kappos puts it, we must improve the basic incompatibilities in our underlying legal systems and look for setting a uniform standard for substantive as well as procedural patent laws. Furthermore, some inertia has overcome the nations in recent years and since about 2006 efforts to move forward with patent harmonization seems to have ground to a halt. The key is to collaborate and renew the attempts taken so far and revamp our approach altogether wherever necessary. It is the need of the hour to move closer towards a global patent harmonization dream with the co-operation from nations all over the globe. It is the aim of every country to have an efficient patent system, boast of a good number of quality patents, be a suitable breeding ground for innovation, and efficaciously protect the rights of inventors and to promote the development of new industries and new jobs. When the goals are the same then why are we having these diversities in patent system and diversity in opinions regarding harmonization of patent laws? This paper puts forwards suggestions on achieving this unification of the patent laws of different countries in an organized phase by phase approach. It also reflects upon the public international law issue in unification of the laws as we understand that unless a practice is of a norm-creating nature, we cannot have a binding law for states to abide by, they can be mere guidelines that states may choose to or not to follow.