Dr Francis Gurry yesterday delivered a speech to the WIPO General Assembly accepting his nomination as Director-General. Dr Gurry’s appointment comes amidst a turbulent period for WIPO. A division had arisen between the developed and developing world over the controversial outgoing Director-General Dr Kamal Indris and additionally, The Australian cites a PriceWaterhouseCoopers audit of WIPO found organisational inefficiencies and staffing-related problems. In his speech Dr Gurry acknowledged:

‘Patent Offices are choking on demand ... There are an estimated 3.5 million unexamined patent applications in the world today. The quality of the output of Patent Offices, pushed to cope with such strong demand, is also under critical scrutiny.’ ‘The Patent Cooperation Treaty…is not providing a sufficiently adequate solution to the crisis in demand management’

Dr Gurry outlined a number of changes to be made to address the grievances leveled at WIPO; namely improving efficiency and improving communication between WIPO, member states, and other UN bodies. View his acceptance speech Forbes article on Dr Gurry

Labels: Australia, Patent News