The average time that patent holders keep their patents for in the UK has fallen drastically short of countries such as Canada and Germany a new report has found.
The average UK patent holder only keeps their patent for 7.6 years according to a recent study by the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO).
By comparison, countries such as Germany have an average of 11.3 years, South Africa 11.1 years and India 11 years.
Out of all of the countries with available data only Russia, Mexico and China fell behind the UK in the length of time that patent holders kept their patents.
The low average age of Chinese patents may also be explained because the majority of their patents will have been issued over the last few years.
As the report says “Patent rights are generally limited to a period of 20 years counted from the filing date. Holders must pay maintenance fees in order to maintain the validity of their patent.”
With over 8.66 million patents in force globally and Britain lagging behind some bigger economies it begs the question why people are not holding their patents for longer.
The UK’s current patent renewal system may be to blame. The UKIPO recently launched an online patent application and renewals system, which it says will take only four minutes to renew a patent.
But to put this into perspective, a business which is granted just 50 UK patents a year would spend a working week processing their UK renewals without even having worked on their international patents.
Not only is the process time consuming, but it is also costly. RenewalsDesk was founded to save time and money on patent renewals. We help users to setup automatic renewal payments and reminders for all of their patents worldwide, thus avoiding many of the hefty fees of outsourcing the job.