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Multilingualism and the International Patent System: an Assessment of the Fairness of the Language Policy of WIPO

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Abstract

This article provides an evaluation of the language policy of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), by focusing on the reform enacted in 2008 when the Korean language was given the status of a language of publication of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). Results show that the 2008 reform entailed a reduction in the costs of access to the PCT procedures for Korean-speaking applicants of about 54%, generating about €24 million savings for them from 2009 to 2011. Further, the new language policy led to a more balanced distribution of admission and interaction costs among applicant countries. It is plausible that the 2008 reform has brought about a transfer of information costs from Korean-speaking countries to English-speaking countries and inventors fluent in English as a second language, but such negative effects have been offset by exogenous factors. This article shows under which conditions adding the Korean language could have had a positive impact on the cost-effectiveness of the language policy of the PCT system as well.

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Notes

  1. See among others Van Pottelsberghe and Mejer (2010), Harhoff et al. (2009), Guellec and Van Pottelsberghe (2007).

  2. A partially related question regards the relationships between the presence of a common language and the frequency of collaboration between business partners (Dachsa and Pykab, 2010).

  3. See, among others, Tritton and Davis (2014) for a more extensive discussion.

  4. The filing fee is set at 1330 Swiss francs (the official currency of WIPO). This article adopts an exchange rate 1 Euro =1.216 Swiss francs, following the exchange rate used by the IB for its fees on the 1 December 2012.

  5. Other authors estimate a higher average number of pages of patent applications, for example, Van Zeebroeck et al. (2009), Van Pottelsberghe and Mejer (2010) and Archontopoulos et al. (2007). According to a report published by WIPO (2008), the average translation cost of an average patent are higher than €85 per page. However, the choice has been made to adopt the conservative assumption suggested by Roland Berger (2004). The cost estimate provided in this article, therefore, must be viewed as a lower bound.

  6. Source: www.wipo.int/pct/en/fees.pdf.

  7. As the knowledge of English in the Republic of Korea is more widespread than the knowledge of Korean in the English-speaking world, one may expect that, all other things being equal, the aggregate information costs have increased. For a discussion of the position of English as a foreign language in education in Korea, see Jung and Norton (2002). On the position of Korean as a foreign language in the US higher education institutions, see Furman et al. (2010). See European Commission (2012) for continental Europe.

  8. Countries are ranked according to the number of applications published in 2011. The list includes the United States, Japan, Germany, China, the Republic of Korea, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Canada, Finland, Australia, Israel, Denmark, Belgium, India, Austria, Russia, Norway, Singapore, Ireland and Brazil.

  9. The government of Singapore recognises four official languages, that is, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English. The Singaporean government has adopted an English-medium education policy since the 1960s (Chua 2010). As a result, English is the language in which children acquire literacy.

  10. Results do not change substantially if New Zealand is added.

  11. For Canada, see Cardinal (2005).

  12. Between 2009 and 2011, the average unit cost for processing a PCT application was €655 (WIPO 2013). On average 29.6% of this cost can be attributed to translations (WIPO 2006). The actual additional unit translation cost of the 2008 reform is not €194, however. If applications in Korean had been published in English, the abstract would have been translated into French anyway. On average the price for an outsourced translation of an abstract into French from English is €34 (WIPO 2007b). Hence, the additional average unit translation cost per PCT applications filed in Korean can be estimated at €160. As from 2009 to 2011, 14,024 international patent applications were published in Korean, this yields €2.24 million of extra translation costs. Note that the corresponding decrease in admission costs for Korean-speaking applicants between 2009 and 2011 was estimated at €24 million, that is, ten time higher.

  13. See also Van Pottelsberghe and Mejer (2010), Danguy and Van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie (2011), De Rassenfosse and Van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie (2012).

  14. A distinction is often made between short-term fee elasticity and long-term fee elasticity (see De Rassenfosse and Van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie 2013). The former refer to fee elasticity of patents within a 12-month period after the change in fees, whereas the latter refers to the value of the elasticity in a three or four-year period. For the purposes of this article, it is more appropriate to use the long-term fee elasticity.

  15. In two recent papers, the PCT Working Group estimated that the average fee elasticity for the PCT system is −0.0278, denoting a highly inelastic response of PCT filing volumes to variations in the international filing fee (WIPO 2014). The PCT fee elasticity is a bit larger for universities and public research organisations, especially in the developing countries (WIPO 2015b). Nevertheless, the PCT fee elasticity estimated in WIPO (2014) is computed using a model focusing exclusively ‘on the choice between the so-called Paris route and the PCT route. It ignores the possibility that the PCT international filing fee affects applicants’ decision on whether to seek patent protection beyond the office of priority filing’ (WIPO 2014). In addition, the model ‘ignores that the level of the PCT fee might affect applicants’ decision on whether to file for patent protection to begin with’ (WIPO 2015b). As shown later in this section, however, just a minority of PCT applications from the Republic of Korea are based on prior national applications, and after 2008 the PCT route has not replaced the Paris route for Korean applicants. For this reason, the estimation strategy adopted by the PCT Working Group does not fit with our analysis.

  16. I assume a linear progression in the effect of a reduction of fees on filing volumes. Hence, a 20% decrease in fees will have double the effect of a 10% fee change and half the effect of a 40% decrease.

  17. This number is higher than the number of PCT applications published in Korean (14,024) because some of the international applications filed in Korean were published in English between 2009 and 2010. This is due to the fact that these two years were a transitory period. After 2011, all PCT applications filed in Korean were subsequently published in Korean.

  18. To wit, the overall number of PCT applications filed in the world was 374,586 between 2003 and 2005, 472,817 between 2006 and 2008 (+26%), and 502,182 between 2009 and 2011 (+6.2%). The number of PCT applications filed with the KIPO was 11,112 between 2003 and 2005, 20,882 between 2006 and 2008 (+87%), and 28,077 between 2009 and 2011 (+34%).

  19. Considering a certain time lag between the publication of a PCT application and the beginning of the national phase (see Section 2), it is more appropriate to refer to 2009 when evaluating the relationships between the reform and NPEs.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Gaetan de Rassenfosse, Giuseppe Fiorani, François Grin, Bruno Le Feuvre, François Vaillancourt, Alessia Volpe, the statistics service of WIPO and the referees for their useful remarks and valuable help. The author is the only responsible for any errors that may remain and for the views expressed in the article. The financial support from the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission (Project number PIEF-GA-2012-327225) and from the Swiss National Science Foundation (project PBGEP1-136158 and project PBGEP1-145655) is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Research Group Economics and Language (REAL), Department of Education Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Michele Gazzola

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 6 Languages in which international patent applications have been published between 2009 and 2011, by technological sector (according to the International Patent Classification)
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Gazzola, M. Multilingualism and the International Patent System: an Assessment of the Fairness of the Language Policy of WIPO. J Ind Compet Trade 17, 349–369 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10842-016-0239-7

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