During today's discussion at the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) on patent quality KEI make four points in its intervention.

1. WIPO should consider gathering information on the costs of litigation to challenge the validity of patents.

2. WIPO should consider creating a database to share information on the cases where litigation has resulted findings that patent claims as invalid.

The following are excerpts from 42 USC 17231, enacted as part of the United States Energy Storage Competitiveness Act of 2007 (Pub. L. 110–140, DEC. 19, 2007) as part of a larger program of federal subsidies in the field of energy, the Congress has created a system of compulsory licenses of patents, designed specifically to:

The USPTO has a federal register notice out asking for public comment on a welcome new initiative, modeled after the FDA priority review voucher, to create incentives to license patents for humanitarian uses. The initiative is set out here: http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/pdf/2010-23395.pdf.

The use of the patent system is quite different from country to country. The following table provides the number of WIPO PCT patent filings, by country of origin, from January 2005 to November 2009, per million residents.* The source of the data on PCT filings is the February 2010 version of the WIPO Statistics Database. (WIPO notes the 2009 data are provisional and incomplete). The PCT counts are based on the international filing date and the country of residence of the first named applicant.