Part of Patents Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 3:30 pm on 15 June 2004.
In another place, the concerns of bioscientists were addressed by making the identity of inventors confidential in schedule 2. The bioindustry raised with me the problem that I brought up on Second Reading that what really needs to be kept confidential to protect the safety of bioscientists from animal rights activists is not their identity but their address. If their identity is also protected, that makes it harder to do a search against known inventors for important inventions, which makes it more difficult to discover whether a patent exists. The purpose of the amendments is to discover whether it might be better to keep inventors' addresses confidential instead of their names, in the hope that that would provide some protection for bioscientists without causing difficulty for the BioIndustry Association.
How will the measure work in practice in relation to other European countries, which may have different rules about confidentiality? Will it be possible to look up on a German patent office website the name and address of an inventor, despite the fact that the name, address or both is kept secret on the UK Patent Office website? I would be grateful if the Minister addressed those concerns and talked us through how, in practice, international confidentiality is expected to work, and what he thinks is the right way forward for protecting scientists and allowing searches for bioindustry inventions.