THE QUALITY OF THE PATENT PRIVILEGES GRANTED IN BRAZIL UNDER THE PERSPECTIVE OF PATENT NULLITY LAWSUITS

Abstract

For patents to be used as a driving force for innovation, competitiveness and technological progress, the system must operate efficiently and with quality. There are studies that found that the Brazilian National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) has not complied with the constitutional mandate of efficiency, given the chronic delay in the analysis of patent applications, which far exceeds the reasonableness. The present article proposes to move in a different and still little explored direction. The purpose of this paper is to study the rigor of the Brazilian patent system regarding the analysis of patent applications to verify if there is a quality crisis in it. If so, this finding would reinforce the need for revision the system so that its mediate purpose (promotion of the economic, social and technological development of the country) can be achieved. The literature points out that one way of assessing the quality of a patent system is to determine the rate at which technical decisions made by the patent office are challenged in the legal sphere. In Brazil, every patent invalidity action must be noted in the INPI magazine. Based on this information, it was possible to conduct an unprecedented empirical investigation on the quality of patent privileges granted in the country. From the perspective of this work, the quality of the patent was analyzed from the point of view of legal compliance with the patentability criteria. This is a descriptive and explanatory research, with qualitative and quantitative character, which used the empirical and inductive method.

Backlog; efficiency; patent quality; nullity; litigation