Seeing someone else profit off of your patent or IP always leaves a sour taste in our mouths. Luckily, there are laws that allow us to protect our ideas and punish those who want to steal them. However, adopting those laws, or even enforcing them strongly depends on the specific country. In other words, some countries have pretty rigid legislation when it comes to these things whereas others can be laxer. Considering how state law has a limited domain, it’s natural that some countries allow their businesses to simply copy the design or infrastructure of other intellectual properties. Here are the best and the worst countries in terms of IP protection.
China
China is a massive country with a massive manufacturing industry that seemingly can do whatever it feels like with IPs from other countries. From toys to gadgets we can see a ton of memes with Chinese products that are outright a copy of something that was developed in western cultures. That being said it seems they are invoking more strict laws nowadays and showing goodwill to combat this trend.
Venezuela, India, and Pakistan
These countries are also performing very poorly and are ignoring calls to tighten up their patent laws. However, this seems to be a trend among the underdeveloped countries, and it’s not necessarily an ill intent on their part. One of the reasons why patent laws are not too strict is because people who live there cannot even afford the original product in the first place. So, countries see this as a growth opportunity for their own economy. In other words, as their economy grows stronger and as they start to draw more foreign investors, they will likely change those policies to a more satisfying standard.
Finnland, Switzerland and Singapour
These are currently some of the best countries when it comes to IP protection regulations. As you can see all of them are pretty stable and strong economies, and real leaders when it comes to living standards on the global level. This only reinforces the point that some of those laws are tightened up once the country becomes more developed.
Japan
Japan is another leader in this section, and they are a country that was pretty devastated during the mid 20th century. However, it seems that these drastic growths are only possible when there is great unity on a national level. Also, Japan is the second patent producer on a global scale, so it is natural that they would have strict laws when it comes to IP protection.
Nowadays, if you wish to thoroughly protect your IP you will likely have to file a patent with the USA, European Patent Office, Japan, Canada, and China.