Dr. Jul Aida U. Enock of the USM main campus and Dr. Jonald L. Pimentel of the USM Kidapawan City Campus completed a  four day Certificate Course on Patents and Introduction to Patent Drafting  at the Intellectual Property  Philippines , Makati City on July 7- 10, 2009.

The four day  course were attended by 65 participants from the different SUC’s, mostly represented by their research and IP coordinators, lawyers and paralegal assistants from different law firms and engineers from different companies of the country.

Sponsored by the Intellectual Property Research and Training Institute of the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines.  Lecturers of the course were patent examiners of IPO and Patent Agents from the different IP law firms of the country who have passed the Patent Agent qualifying Examination (PAQE) undertaken by the European Patent Office.

Under RA 8923, a patent is a protection of one’s invention. It is granted to an inventor applicant if his/her claims on his invention is novel (new), has inventive step and has industrial applicability.  A patent application is usually not granted if the invention was already disclosed or revealed by the inventor to the public.

On the other hand, Dr. Pimentel attended another seminar on “Patent Drafting” in preparation for the Patent Agent Qualifying Examination (PAQE) held on August 17-20, 2009 at Mandarin Oriental Hotel Manila. The said training was sponsored by Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPO-Phil) and the European Patent Office (EPO).  He said that the  Patent Agent Qualifying Examination  proper was held on September 4, 2009 at IPO-Phil, Makati City which was administered by EPO.  The results of the exam will be released probably in January 2010.