Incentives for Filipino inventors urged

INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—A Quezon City councilor has asked her colleagues in the local council to call on Congress to enact a law that would provide incentives to inventors for their patents and make available to the public details of the new technology they developed.

Fifth district councilor Julienne Alyson Medalla, in her proposed council resolution, said that offering incentives to inventors would strongly motivate them to come up with more inventions that would ultimately benefit the country’s economy.

She suggested for the incentives to come in the form of tax benefits, allowances, and acknowledgement of the inventions.

“Technological innovation and information technologies represent a way for developing nations to foster economic development, improve levels of education and training as well,” she explained.

Patents, she said, would encourage the disclosure of the innovations that could be further improved by other inventors.

“One of the advantages of modern patent usage is that a small-time inventor can use the exclusive right status to become a licensor allowing him to accumulate capital from licensing the invention,” Medalla said.

She added that modern patent usage could also promote health competition among manufacturers who could design around the patented invention and make gradual improvements on the technology base, which Medalla said “may help augment the economy and confer better living standards to the citizens.”