Entre o direito e a inovação: a celeridade processual como elemento primordial ao estímulo à P, D&I para doenças negligenciadas e as medidas adotadas pelo INPI no combate ao backlog de patentes

Abstract

Globalization and technological progress have led to an increase in complex inventions, intensifying the demand for intellectual property rights. This creates challenges in patent offices, which cannot process all requests in an agile and swift manner, especially in Brazil, which has the largest patent backlog in the world. Consequently, the unreasonable delay in analyzing requests impedes the realization of the patent system, insofar as the efficiency of the bodies responsible for the examination and granting of exclusivity is crucial to foster innovation and economic development. This fact is even more worrying concerning neglected diseases, which do not have a large volume of inventions, and, the few that are developed, are subject to the unwarranted slowness of examiners. To reverse this problem, the INPI has been building, since 2013, policies for prioritizing patent applications to expedite the analysis of certain processes, among which are the diseases mentioned above. In this context, the present study seeks to ascertain what the data collected at INPI related to patents granted for neglected diseases reveal about the performance of measures to prioritize the processing of patent applications for these diseases. The theoretical-methodological reference consists of the Bankowskian distinction between duty morality and aspiration morality, as well as the rules of inference proposed by Epstein and King. In general terms, it was observed that the priority processing established by the INPI seems to have a positive impact, reducing the average time for granting the patent. However, more people, individuals or corporations, beneficiaries of this agility must make use of the benefit, to verify if the reduction of the analysis time is maintained when there is an increase in the number of requests with priority. On the other hand, there are indications that INPI's previous approach, through priority examination, did not achieve the objective proposed by the agency. Finally, the present analysis found that there are a reduced number of patents granted for neglected diseases, indicating an imbalance in the patent legal system. In addition, these inventions are restricted to the public sector, demonstrating the need to rethink the national innovation policy.