Protection of Inventions

Intellectual Property Right awareness among Indonesian students and lecturers is still very low, according to the Chief of Intellectual Property Right Team of the Department of Education i.e Professor Soeprapto in an interview with Kompas on Monday 17 November 2008. He explained that from 1985 until 2007, universities/institutes only submitted 419 Patent applications, which is definitely very low compared to the total of 2.800 universities/institutes in Indonesia.

As a comparison, Prof. Soeprapto said that Japan has 370,000 Patent applications a year, and India has 17,000 a year. While in Indonesia, only 419 Patent applications were submitted during a period of 23 years. The main obstacle is because most of the scientific works were merely repetitions of previous works, therefore they are ineligible to be considered as Patent which should fulfill 3 conditions: Novelty, Verifiability & Applicability. He added that awareness regarding Intellectual Property Right is still low and most students & lecturer think that Patent application is expensive. Actually in 2008 the government has allocated special incentive for 50 Patent applications amounting to Rp 7.5 million per application, but only 21 were sumitted. And for 2009, incentive has been allocated for 100 Intellectual Property Right applications, including 30 Patent applications. He further stated that out of the 2.800 universities/institutes, only 5 actively submitted Patent applications, i.e. Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), 10th November Institute of Technology, Gajahmada University and Brawijaya University.

Considering the above it is very important to socialize the incentives granted by government for submission of Patent Application, that way our scientists in general and students & lecturers in particular would want to submit Patent Application to protect their inventions. If the scientists know that it is not so difficult and expensive to do so, they would have peace of mind and eager to create more inventions.

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