The full document is here: govfunding-designs
National (or regional) obligations to disclose funding in applications for IP protection, including designs
Responses from Gemini.Google.Com when asked about national laws in several countries
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is holding a diplomatic conference to conclude and adopt a Design Law Treaty (DLT). One feature of the proposed treaty that is controversial, but considered a core objective of agreement by its proponents, is to limit the “indications or elements” that are allowed in a national application for protection of designs. These limits are the closed list set out in Article 3 of the treaty and Rule 2 of the regulations. Some proposals considered would create space for information regarding the eligibility of a design for protection, but there are also several areas where disclosures would be important, even when the eligibility for protection is not an issue.
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) has provided a briefing notes to delegates (here, here and here), discussing several such topics, including disclosures of:
- government funding,
- relationships between a design and a standard,
- the basis for various benefit sharing obligations,
- license of right designations,
- information to assist efforts to prevent fraud,
- demographic, economic or financial data on the owners of the rights, including the size of a firm by revenue or employment, or
- the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in creating a design.
A particular interest of KEI concerns government funding of protected designs.
KEI used the Google AI tool Gemini to research the obligations, if any, in various countries, to disclose federal funding on applications for design protection. These are the verbatim outputs from those queries. Gemini, like other generative AI chat services, is not always accurate, so readers should not rely on specific answers without additional due diligence. However, it does seem that the obligations to disclose government funding are in fact fairly common, although the nature and type of obligation varies considerably. The obligations seem to trend toward the type of disclosures mandated by the U.S. Bayh-Dole Act.
The following are the Gemini outputs:
See the full document here: govfunding-designs
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