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PATENT, TRADEMARK, AND COPYRIGHT: Operating on a Global Scale
by Bryan Harris, Director, PTC Research Foundation
This year's aim of the Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Research Foundation is to become more widely-known internationally while catering to the interests of intellectual property practitioners, executives, professors, and students all over the world.
This past March, the Foundation made a start in Europe, with meetings in Brussels. The principal meeting was with the officials of the European Commission (the administrative institution of the European Union) responsible for both intellectual property questions and the broader problems in Europe of stimulating innovation and creativity. The Academy's CEO Don Kelly and I met with officials in the offices of Mr. Paul Van Doren of the Commission.
The officials represented the Directorates General for External Relations, for Trade, and for Research they showed a lively interest in the work of both the Academy of Applied Science and the PTC Research Foundation. Six months previously, the European Commission had published a "Green Paper," a consultative document, on the problems of encouraging innovation in Europe, where the number of applications for patents lags well behind those from the United States and Japan. For the benefit of the officials Kelly and I described the Academy's work in encouraging innovation and creativity at the secondary-school stage and were able to refer to the JSHS Symposium being held in Brussels during that very week. We were also able to direct the officials' attention to the three PTC Research Foundation websites. The first of these explains the general activities of the Research Foundation (ptcresearch.org), the second comprises the online journal and forum (ptcforum.org), while the third opens up the prospects for online, interactive conferences and seminars, with some titles of forthcoming conferences in the intellectual property field. (ptcconferences.org)
The meeting was the first of a series of meetings planned by the Academy and the Foundation, of which the next will be with the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization, both of which have their headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
These are, we believe, the first steps towards cooperation between public and official bodies which have considerable influence throughout the world in the intellectual property field and ourselves. Our visit in Brussels was cordial and, we believe, mutually helpful; we have good reason to hope that subsequent meetings, in Geneva and elsewhere, will have a similar success.
While in Brussels, we also met Stanley Crossick, the Chairman of the European Policy Group, Europe's leading think-tank, who knows everyone in the institutions of the European Union and has promised to help in any way he can; as well as Maria Laptev, Vice-Chairman of GPC Brussels, a leading company of European consultants, who would like to work closely with the Academy and the Research Foundation on matters of common interest.