UKIPO: time to ‘start from scratch’ to achieve radical change
The UK Intellectual Property Office ( UKIPO) is undergoing possibly the most radical overhaul of its digital services yet.
As well as removing legal barriers to its rights services, the UKIPO wishes to address current inconsistencies between the different IP rights.
The ‘One IPO’ transformation programme—now about 18 months in—is a root-and-branch reform of the IPO’s digital systems and processes, which aims to modernise and streamline all of its services to provide a single, integrated system across all IP rights.
To help with this facelift, the office launched a public consultation earlier this month (November) on proposals for the legal changes needed to deliver this transformation, which will close on January 6, 2023.
Mike Prior, deputy director of rights policy at the UKIPO, tells WIPR more about this change, and why the office is calling on all customers to participate in the consultation.
Why have you launched the consultation, and why now?
Our ambition is to be the best IP office in the world. But a lot of the way we operate in terms of securing, managing and allowing people to challenge IP rights stem from paper-based processes, which date from the 20th century, sometimes even the 19th century.
And things work differently between the different rights, which is sometimes justified, but sometimes it's a historical accident. That's confusing for our customers. So for us, it's not just about digitising old processes and putting things online, but really starting from scratch and looking at all of the different services that we offer.
So how can we harness the power of new technologies, such as AI? And how can we build in that flexibility to adapt to the future?
To do all of that we need to make legal, policy and practice changes, and we need to start thinking about making those changes now to inform possible future legislation, and to make sure we get the design of our new services and systems right. So that's why we're consulting now.
Why is getting the views of IP professionals so important?
The first point is that the consultation is a public one. And it's not just IP professionals we want to hear from—we want to hear from all kinds of the IPO’s customers and businesses that hold, use and navigate IP rights directly.
That said, IP professionals are a key part of our customer base who work on behalf of their clients to get the very best for the IP system, and they provide that enormous added value. Part of the reason that our default recommendation to unrepresented applicants is to consider getting advice from an IP professional is because of that added value, and that intimate and expert working knowledge of the systems that we offer.
And making sure that the changes we make in transformation supports IP professionals delivering what's best for their clients is something we're really keen to ensure and factor into our design considerations.
If it doesn't work for IP professionals, it's not doing what we want it to do. So that's why we’re doing the consultation. And that's why the offer of being involved in user testing is there; we really want to bring IP professionals along on the transformation journey with us, and really involve them in the design choices we make.
How will the new IP system benefit your users?
The programme will provide a single integrated service for all IP rights—it's not just digitising our paper forms, it's really transformational in the way we deliver that service. And it will allow innovators and businesses to apply for, manage and research all IP rights in one place.
We want to make it easier to understand, faster, more straightforward, more flexible, more user-friendly and efficient, and less hassle for people to use. Just being able to see all of your UK IP in one place on a single register—that's a big step forward for us.
We have lots of different systems with information to be found in different places, but that's just not convenient for people. At the moment, we have online systems, but they're essentially a kind of paper form that is online.
One big change is that you won't have to keep inputting your data for different applications. [Currently] every time you file with us, you have to type in your name and address but it's going to be a much more streamlined process.
We are a very data-rich organisation, and we live in an age of data. We want to harness the power in that data for maximum benefit to UK innovation.
Some of that can be of internal benefit to UK government policy making. But also, if we provide more powerful tools for researching and analysing IP, we help businesses across the UK access the newest, brightest ideas and boost UK innovation.
Won’t there be an initial burden upon users as they get to grips with the new system?
It will be a new system, but we want to make it user-friendly and efficient and less hassle. We will provide some guidance, explaining what the change is and how it's different to help people through that change curve as they get on to the new system and start using it.
So hopefully it's going to take away burdens and make things easier and more intuitive. You buy things these days and they don't come with an instruction manual, because they are designed to be intuitive. That's kind of what we've got in mind.
A big part of the consultation focuses on tribunals services. Are there any particular aspects of these which you feel could work better, and how will your proposed changes benefit rights holders and their representatives?
At the moment, our digital service for hearings and tribunals at the IPO is non-existent, because everything is fully paper-based. So that's going to be a big stage [of the transformation].
But as we work through the design of it, there are a few things we're looking to achieve. We want to design the service to help our customers resolve their IP registration disputes at an early stage—and we want to resolve those disputes through mediation rather than people thinking that they have to go to court straightaway.
That's going to make the process easier, quicker and cheaper for everyone while still ensuring that fairness. We already offer some mediation services for patents, but we're looking at the new service to offer mediation for trademarks and designs as well, which is bringing that harmonisation between the rights that I mentioned.
This service is under development, and our starting point is really to understand customer needs and design the service around those.
Can you expand upon the legal changes that you’re looking at?
We need to underpin changes to our services, because some of the peculiar features that have existed from time immemorial in the UK IP system are baked into legislation. Sometimes that's primary legislation, sometimes secondary legislation, but essentially we need to change this legislation to deliver the full potential of what transformation can offer.
That said, legislative change is not something we can do on our own as an IPO—we are part of a wider government which has its own political priorities, so we need to factor in how we work with that. But we need to speak to stakeholders as well—the IP professional community—to understand how best we should make those changes. The question is: do we need to make that legal change at all? Could we design the system in a different way?
So it's understanding all of that to make sure we are ready, so when an opportunity for making legal changes is available, we can take it and make sure that we deliver on that transformation potential.
What are the broader challenges that will be addressed by the new-look ‘One IPO’ system?
There are three main challenges that we're responding to. The first is that demand for our services has increased over time, so we need to make sure that our services are equipped to meet that demand, whether that's clearing patent backlogs, or coping with the influx of trademarks post Brexit.
The second challenge is that digital technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace. We've got the metaverse, web 3.0, NFTs, AI…So we need to do something to bring our services up to those modern standards, and allow people to see their IP in one place, overhauling our internal systems to make sure that they're up to date.
I think our oldest IT system dates back to the late 1980s. Others are much more recent. But overall, it's a patchwork quilt, and some of the patches are pretty threadbare by this point.
And then I guess the final challenge is that it's a difficult economic landscape. As a government agency we need to provide maximum value for money while encouraging and facilitating innovation and economic growth.
We need to make sure that our systems and processes are as efficient as they can be, to allow us to do our jobs efficiently and offer value for money for the public. But also so we can open up the power in our data, and allow customers to use that data to boost UK innovation and growth. And that's why the input of customers [via the consultation] is really helpful.
Further information
The One IPO service will be available to the first patent-focused customers in spring 2024, followed by trademarks and designs in 2025.
Overall, the transformation programme promises a shiny new service that will include four principal tools: Manage IP, a customer account dashboard with everything in one place; Secure IP, an application, registration and granting service; Research IP, which will provide new tools to help customers search and analyse IP insights; and Challenge IP, a revamped hearings and tribunals service.
The consultation will last for nine weeks, ending on January 6, 2023. More information about the consultation and how to respond is available on the UKIPO’s consultation website.
If you’d like to take part in the UKIPO’s research and testing, contact usertesting@ipo.gov.uk to register your interest.
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