——An Exclusive Interview to Manuel Desantes, Former Vice President of EPO

"I do believe that the cooperation between China and Europe is and will be always win-win. When the two sides started cooperating thirty years ago, we had already understood this principle", Desantes, Former Vice President of the Europe Patent Office (EPO) and Professor of the University of Alicante (Spain) said in an exclusive interview to CIP news.

"At the beginning, it could look like that the EPO has given lots of supports to SIPO, including information tools, technical tools and training. But gradually we learned that SIPO was growing up very rapidly and was going to be one day even bigger than EPO. Today SIPO works with the EPO on a complete equal basis, and I am very satisfied to have been able to participate in this evolution", he said.

Back to 1980, the then China Patent Office sent a delegation to Munich in Germany to get training and to learn from the experience of the EPO. On June 11, 1985, both offices signed an official cooperation agreement and since then conduct cooperation in an all-round way. "It's worth noting that when an agreement on strategic cooperation partnership was signed in 2007, SIPO and the EPO moved from technical to strategic cooperation".

"We all share the view that IPR is a strategic tool for promoting development, a tool for stimulating innovation and creation. We all know that our duty is to provide maximum quality of services to our societies. Also, we share the profound understanding that we are living in a global world and that we are not at all isolated", Professor Desantes told the CIP News reporter.

"IPR cooperation constitutes an important part of economic and trade relations between China and Europe. For instance, SIPO and the EPO have similar training mechanism for IPR officials，and a very similar IPR law system which combine each other very well. All these should have consequences: so, it should be much easier for Chinese enterprises to invest in Europe and for European enterprises to invest in China. I am more than convinced that close IPR cooperation between the two sides is already playing a positive role to strengthen China-EU economic ties and innovation",he pointed out. 

For many years, Desantes was one of the leaders designing the cooperation strategy and witnessed the fast development of IPR in China. He is deeply confident in China's future IPR development: "In the past ten years, China has made an enormeous effort in IPR and got great achievements, probably like never before in the  history of humanity. Chinese government has brought IPR as one of its full priorities, has formulated detailed IPR strategy and has taken remarkable efforts in implementing this strategy. Leaders as Mr. Tian Lipu are a treasure not only for China, but for all of us. I am deeply convinced that China will be pretty soon at the top of the rankings in the fulfillment of its obligations in WTO, especially in fields related to IPR."

What struck him most about his last visit is the development of patent agencies in China. "I am so glad to have had the chance to know directly about how the IPR firms work in China. I have visited many of them with my firm and can testify not only that they are outstanding but, above all, that they have so many highly-educated IPR professionals!".

(China IP News)