Unpaid Patent Annual Fee Causes Huge Losses to Patent Office of Indonesia

Indonesian Patent Office has sent letters to 7600 patent owners in Indonesia in order to recover the unpaid annual fee along with Interest as soon as possible. It has come to notice that Rp 150 Billion ($12,000,000) is unpaid which has caused huge financial loss to the government. Most of the owners presented themselves as ‘Foreign entities’ on receiving the said letters.

Article 115 (1) of Indonesian Patent Law 2001 provides that a patent shall be deemed void, incase the patent owner fails to pay patent annual fee for consecutive 3 years. Therefore, according to the said law, Thousand of Patents were abandoned by patent office due to non-payment. However, the patent owner can still clear the unpaid amount even tough patent is passively abandoned. Otherwise it will be consider as debt.

The Indonesian Directorate General of Intellectual Property Rights (DGIP) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Indonesian Anti-Counterfeiting Society (MIAP) to handle this situation.

Indonesian Directorate General of Intellectual Property (DGIP) attempted to recover the debt in 2015; unfortunately the approach failed and did not succeed.

The DGIP has now taken strong decision of not accepting any new patent filing applications from the defaulter patent owners who have not cleared the pending debt of their previously filed Patents. The Indonesian patent office is determined to settle all such debt by 15.02.2019. This surprising move by DGIP has made patent holders worry and think whether the payment of the outstanding annuities will actually have any effect for the future patent applications by them.

Author: Ms. Deepika Sharma, Sr. Patent Associate at Khurana & Khurana, Advocates and IP Attorneys. In case of any queries please contact/write back to us at [email protected].