/ New industrial property institutional framework

Santiago Ortúzar
Partner
Alessandri Abogados

With the recent approval of the amendment to the Industrial Property Law and the upcoming approval of the Madrid Protocol, Chile enters a new stage of modernization of its industrial property institutions.

For a country that for several decades has boasted of being open to the globalized world, with multiple free trade agreements, it was essential to modernize industrial property legislation with a vision that looks towards the world and less towards ourselves.

Institutions such as the Madrid Protocol, as well as the possibility of cancelling trademark registrations for lack of use, speak to us of less concern for the formalities of obtaining a registration and more for the creation of intellectual property. The world has been moving towards a more professional counseling, less oriented to comply with formalities and more oriented to give advice. The new legislation is a great step forward in that sense.

Without the Chilean industrial property agency (INAPI) losing the power to object to the granting of a right, these two institutions open the way to facilitate the registration of trademarks when there is a real intention to use them, in the least bureaucratic way possible. We are moving from a registration system, with emphasis on a bureaucratic procedure necessary to obtain protection, towards a system in which its use in the market acquires greater relevance. The elimination of the requirement of graphic representation in trademark matters is the best demonstration of the path that our legislation has taken. Greater ease and more protection for the different forms of creativity.

In the area of patents, the new institution of the provisional patent and the facility to register designs are leaps forward in promoting local innovation. Once again, the amendments focus more on protection than on the requirements to get a registration.

The amendments introduced to the Law, of which I have only mentioned a few, speak to us of a country that is no longer only interested in producing raw materials, and that now wishes to become an innovation and technology producer. A country where we are less concerned with formal requirements to protect rights and more interested in fostering creativity. It is up to us lawyers to support our clients on this path of professional advice to detect and promote innovation within our country and try to ensure, with the least possible cost and procedure, its protection in the globalized world. The new legislation begins to create a new institutional framework that points to this path. We hope that our country will follow the path that has been so favorable to the most developed economies.