Canon and Toyota found COVID-19 IP partnership
Japanese multinationals Canon and Toyota have pledged not to enforce their patents and other IP rights against any activities aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19, as part of a new partnership.
The COVID-19 Countermeasure Declaration was founded by Canon, Toyota and nearly 20 others, including Nikon, Nissan, Yahoo Japan Corp and Kyoto University.
The companies have declared that they won’t assert any patents, utility models, designs or copyrights against activities aimed at halting the pandemic, including diagnosis, prevention, containment and treatment.
Trademark rights and trade secrets are excluded from the declaration.
“The rapid development and manufacture of therapeutic drugs, vaccines, medical devices, infection control products and the like are central to stopping the spread of COVID-19,” said the declaration.
The partnership said that “accomplishing this as swiftly as possible calls for a new kind of cooperation between industry, government, and academia, that breaks the moulds of traditional models”.
According to Canon, which founded the declaration with Fumihiko Matsuda of Kyoto University, by eliminating the need for a complicated, time-consuming analysis of IP rights and licence negotiations, this declaration “clears the way for the fastest possible” means of research, development and manufacture of tools to combat the spread of COVID-19.
“Among other things, in the current climate, we cannot allow patent, design, copyright, and other IP rights to interfere with the deployment of these critical items,” added the partnership.
This is the second collaboration which aims to open up IP to fight the pandemic that WIPR has reported on in recent weeks.
The “Open COVID-19 Pledge”— launched in late March by a group of scientists, lawyers and entrepreneurs—has been gaining momentum over the past month.
In early April, Intel joined the pledge, which invites IP owners to grant free and temporary licences to use their patent and copyright protected technology to end the pandemic.
Intel was shortly followed by Amazon, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Microsoft, and Sandia National Laboratories, who joined later that month.
Sister-site LSIPR has published an in-depth look at calls to offer up IP for free, and what it means for patent owners.
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