U.S. Ranked #1 on Chamber of Commerce 2017 IP Index

Last month, The United States Chamber of Commerce (USCC) released the 5^th Edition of the International IP Index, entitled “The Roots of Innovation”.  The Index, which posts on the USCC’s Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) website, was established to highlight the importance of intellectual property (IP) in catalyzing economic growth and development, as well as to cultivate healthy competition between nations.  In the current Edition, David Hirschmann, President and CEO of the USCC GIPC, likens IP to a tree.  “Just as a tree cannot grow without roots, innovation cannot thrive without intellectual property.”  At the most basic level, IP leads to job creation (statistics can be found here on the GIPC website).  On a larger scale, IP promotes cross talk and collaboration between multidisciplinary fields, such as medicine, science, and finance.

Initially ranking 11 economies in its First Edition, the current Index now ranks 45 benchmarked economies that comprise 90% of the global gross domestic product based on 35 economic indicators in 6 categories: patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and market access, enforcement, and ratification of international treaties.  The USCC added 5 additional indicators to the current Edition, which highlight the changing digital/software patent landscape.  Implementing these indicators is of particular importance, as US Federal Circuit court rulings on “computer-implemented inventions” in cases such as Amdocs¹, BASCOM², Enfish³, and McRO⁴ have greatly impacted the field.

The United States was ranked #1 in overall score (93%; 32.62/35), which was slightly lower than last year’s score (95%; 28.61/30).  It should be noted that the spread between countries in this Edition has been the closest it has ever been previously, likely indicative of the fact that many governments reviewed and updated their IP laws.  Not surprisingly, Alice⁵, Mayo⁶, and Myriad⁷ were mentioned as being critical cases that helped shape U.S. patent eligibility requirements and later influenced more recent cases, such as Rapid Litigation⁸ (another US Federal Ciruit case in the biotech area) and the above-mentioned cases.

The GIPC Executive Summary can be found here.  Another succinct synopsis of the Index can be found here on the biotechnology and pharmaceutical patent blog, Patent Docs.

_{¹Amdocs Ltd. v. Openet Telecom, Inc.}

_{²BASCOM Global Internet Services, Inc. v. AT&T MOBILITY LLC}

_{³Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corporation}

_{⁴McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games America, Inc.}

_{⁵Alice Corp v. CLS Bank International}

_{⁶Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Labs, Inc.}

_{⁷Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.}

_{⁸Rapid Litigation Management Ltd. v. CellzDirect, Inc.}

-David Puleo and Anthony D. Sabatelli, PhD, JD

David Puleo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Pharmacology Department at Yale University. He is currently involved in two drug discovery projects targeting tyrosine kinases. Prior to attending Yale, David graduated from Boston College with a B.S. in Biochemistry, after which he worked for two years in the Center for Proteomic Chemistry at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Cambridge, MA.

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