Schedule 2 - Minor and consequential amendments
Patents Bill
3:30 pm
Mr Gerry Sutcliffe (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Employment Relations, Competition and Consumers), Department of Trade and Industry; Bradford South, Labour)
Once again, I thank the right hon. Gentleman for pushing the Government and trying to tease out why we want to deal with the problem. He raised the issue on Second Reading, and is quite right to say that it was raised in the other place, too.
I think the right hon. Gentleman accepts that the wording of his amendment would not necessarily resolve the problem in the way that he would like. However, it is the spirit of the amendment and what he is trying to achieve that we need to consider. We all agree that a balance has to be struck between the public's right of access to information about patents and the rights of individuals to have their personal details protected.
As the right hon. Gentleman knows, we originally proposed that an inventor should be able to have his address kept confidential by the Patent Office, but in another place we heard persuasive arguments from the Opposition parties that that did not go far enough, particularly when it came to protecting inventors employed by businesses involved in controversial technologies. We all know of the examples raised in the various debates. The noble Lords pointed out that an inventor's address would be all too easy to find if he had a name that was the least bit unusual—unlike Arbuthnot, which is not unusual in any way. Furthermore, it is worth knowing that in all likelihood the patent applicant will be the inventor's employer. It
would be even easier to locate the inventor, given that the identity and location of his employer would be known.
The right hon. Gentleman's concern about the potential loss of a tool for searching patent databases was certainly considered in another place. I reassure him that the point did not pass us by when we balanced up the competing arguments. We listened to the points made in another place and were persuaded that our original proposal, to which the right hon. Gentleman would like us to return, did not quite get the balance right. It provided little or no real protection for inventors working on controversial technologies. We introduced amendments to make it possible for an inventor to have both his name and address kept confidential by the Patent Office in appropriate circumstances. That will give some protection to those inventors—they are no doubt a small minority—who wish to have such protection, without having a significant effect on the information about patents and applications that is publicly available.
For the sake of completeness, I should mention that that will not be an option if the inventor is also the patent applicant. In that case, his name and address will have to remain available to the public. It is, of course, right that the public always know to whom patent rights have been awarded, and who is requesting those rights.