No really. It’s a real holiday.
While most of us may not be celebrating with cake or a gift exchange of valuable patents, copyrights, and trademarks, this is a great opportunity to reflect on the important field to which this blog is dedicated. This year’s theme was “IP and Youth: Innovating for a Better Future”. Various IP organizations including WIPO, USPTO, ChIPs, LES, and many others hosted webinar panels, shared articles, and sponsored student competitions to highlight the importance of young innovators.
This theme was a great excuse to check the record-books: did you know that Benjamin Franklin invented flippers at the age of 11? More recently, Sydney Dittman is credited with being possibly the youngest person to obtain a U.S. Patent, having conceived her invention for getting into kitchen drawers at age 2 and obtaining a patent at age 4, with the help of her father. There are more young inventors than you might think!
About IP Day (and WIPO!)
April 26 is “World IP Day”, because this date marks the anniversary that the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) Convention entered into force in 1970. The WIPO is a specialized agency of the United Nations, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Its two main objectives are:
(i) to promote the protection of intellectual property worldwide; and
(ii) to ensure administrative cooperation among the intellectual property Unions established by the treaties that WIPO administers.
The WIPO doesn't come up all that often in patent litigation, but did you know that those little codes on the front of a U.S. patent are called INID codes, and are standardized by WIPO?
This can be helpful when you need to prove up the publication date of foreign patent publications! See Tokyo Electron Ltd. v. Daniel L. Flamm, Case IPR2017-01072, Paper No. 7, 2017 Pat. App. LEXIS 13067, at *24-27 (holding that “the Japanese Patent Office's use of INID code 43 to describe the publication dates . . . provides sufficient evidence to conclude that both [references from the petition] constitute printed publications under § 102”).
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