Posted on Tuesday 17 September 2019 by Cruickshank Intellectual Property

Over 641 national patent applications were received by the Irish Patent’s Office last year compared to 268 in 2017 according to the 2018 Annual Report recently published. While trends for 2018 show that the Irish economy is continuously improving with 54% of all GDP generated by IPR intensive companies, uncertainties remain however, and due to Brexit, the future economic landscape in Ireland remains unclear.

As seen above figures for national patent applications were up for last year. Of those 641 applications, 108 were Full Term applications and 533 were Short Term. By the end of 2018 1,549 applications were pending. The number of European Patent applications designating Ireland stood at 174,317 by the end of last year compared to 165,629 in 2017.

The number of national trade mark applications received in 2018 were 2,697, a 2% decrease from 2017 figures, while by the end of 2018 a total of 1,713 national trade marks were registered. Figures for the European Union Trade Mark (EUTM) saw 1,162 applications received from Irish residents.

2018 also saw a significant increase in national design applications with 555 applications, up 155 from 2017. While this is a substantial increase it is worth noting this increase is due to a large number of design applications filed by one applicant. The end of 2018 saw 1,630 designs in force compared to 1,140 in 2017.

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