mexico
1 August 2013Patents

The only way is up - interview with new director general of IMPI

He crossed the bridge from the private sector in January this year, and now Miguel Ángel Margáin, director general of the Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial (IMPI), is bedding into his public service role, one which brings greater responsibility than ever before.

“Now, I have to take into account many, many issues, but in the end this is intellectual property, and that has been my passion for 23 years,” says the former lawyer and lecturer who left his job at law firm Arochi, Marroquin & Lindner to become Mexico’s senior man for IP.

Only a month into his reign, Mexico welcomed one of the biggest changes to its IP system: accession to the Madrid Protocol. The treaty, which allows trademark owners to file one application covering up to 90 countries, entered into force in February 2013 after it was signed the previous November.

Implementing the Madrid system, says Margáin, has been his biggest challenge to date, but “it is working and we are receiving applications and sending applications to Geneva”, the headquarters  of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which manages the Madrid system.

As of July 15, there were 2,084 applications with IMPI as the designated office and 23 with IMPI as the office of origin. Margáin says that within a year he wants 10,000 processed applications overall, which would mean about 10 percent of the 105,825 national trademark applications IMPI handled last year.

“We are in the final stage of implementing an information exchange platform with a service-oriented architecture,” he says. “Our goal is to develop a management system for trademarks that allows registrations and detailed consultations of WIPO notifications about international applications.

"We are mapping and identifying the differences between the national and international processes, establishing a legal basis for endorsing an automated process to fulfil the WIPO standards, and applying changes in the management of our trademark and administrative processes for the best implementation of the Madrid Protocol.

“The second challenge—and one of the most important—is increasing the number of patent applications filed by nationals,” Margáin says. “We are working very closely with science and technology institutes in Mexico and Mexican universities (public and private), and have been visiting them. It is very important to tell them that IMPI is a very user-orientated patent and trademark office, so we have to be friendly with the patent filers.”

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