A challenging year in Iceland

01-02-2012

Ólafur Ragnarsson

The financial crisis continued to affect the Icelandic intellectual property (IP) market in 2011. The number of applications for trademark registrations went up slightly, after going down in 2009 and 2010.

Applications for national patent filings continued to decrease, while the number of European patent applications increased. International design applications increased, but national registrations declined from a record number in 2010. The total number of IP applications in 2011 was close to the number of applications in 2007, the year before the Icelandic banking collapse.

Patents

The majority of patent applications in Iceland come through the European Patent Office (EPO) as national validations of European patents. In 2011, 778 European patents were validated in Iceland, which was a 36 percent increase on 2010. The number of national patent applications continued to decline, as they have done since Iceland acceded to the European Patent Convention (EPC) in 2004.


trademark registrations, Icelandic banking collapse, patent applications, design, IP protection

WIPR