Best measures of intellectual property include laws, court decisions, and regulations, and refer to a wide range of factors that ‘strengthen’ IPR ‘protection.

I’ve written before on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s International Intellectual Property Index, which ranks the strength of countries’ intellectual property protection based on publicly available information about the IP landscape in each country. This includes laws, regulations, court decisions, academic studies, analysis from bodies like OECD, and news stories. As I mentioned in my post on the 2014 index, a fair amount of subjectivity goes into the document, which ranks the U.S. #1 and is used to promote the expansion of U.S.-style intellectual property norms.

Today I came across James Nurton’s post on the Managing IP Blog about the multinational law firm Taylor Wessing’s Global Intellectual Property index (GIPI). This comparison of countries’ IP protection ranks the U.S. at 24 out of 43 – tied with Chile and occupying a neighborhood in the list among other countries the U.S. has accused of inadequate IP protection.

The difference between the “International” and “Global” IP Indexes is based on what each measures. Not only does it account for the difference in the American ranking, it also suggests that the focus of some IP advocacy does not always reflect what people who rely on IP deem important.

The GIPI bases its rankings on a worldwide survey of IP owners and users giving over 14,000 assessments , as weighted bearing in mind data from 50 objective sources (or ‘instrumental factors’). The latter includes published empirical data, such as the number of patent or trade mark filings and grants, the value of royalty fee payments, R&D expenditure and the origin of counterfeits as seized by customs.

It is unclear from the report how the weights were applied, but at its base, the GIPI seems to be a product of the survey respondents’ views. Respondents were asked to score countries based on how well they could obtain, exploit, enforce and challenge each of the four main IP rights: patents, copyrights, trademarks, and designs. They were given the following list of ‘influencing factors’ they could use to justify their score [not to be confused with the ‘instrumental factors’ for weighting].

Overall costs

Competence, reputation and specialisation of judges

Availability of competent professionals advisors

Speed of procedures/decisions

Consistency, reliability and ease of predicting decisions

Strength of court remedies, including amounts of damages awarded and availability of interim/preliminary injunctions

Adequate or insufficient body of clear IP law

Ability or inability to recover costs from losing opponent

Extent to which you can control timetables

Signatory to relevant international treaties

Presence or absence of burdensome procedure/bureaucracy

Ability or inability to attack rights through cheaper/quicker registries rather than courts

Judgments/decisions influential in other countries

Renewal costs and ease of renewal

Openness to alternative dispute resolution/mediation

Availability of finance/venture capital

Attractiveness of Tax Regime for IP rights

These influencing factors were based on responses to previous GIPI surveys in which respondents had been “invited… to volunteer in free text.” In other words, these are the things that previous survey takers had identified as what was important to them. They amount to a different criteria than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s International IP Index – one that seems less concerned with the structure of IP law and more concerned with the practical aspects of using the IP system.

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