The ASEAN Secretariat announced on 20 September that the fourth ASEAN Economic Ministers–WIPO (AEM-WIPO) Consultation, held in Manila, welcomed the launch of new value-added services on the ASEAN IP Register: an IP Portfolio service and an IP Intelligence service, intended to give ASEAN stakeholders better data to inform their innovation decisions. The meeting also reviewed progress under the ASEAN–WIPO Memorandum of Understanding on the Expansion of Cooperation in Specific Areas, which currently oversees 44 activities for the advancement of the IP ecosystem in ASEAN.
The ASEAN IP Register, developed with WIPO support, has so far served mainly as a single regional search entry point for patent, trade mark and design data from the ASEAN member offices; the official announcement does not yet describe the functions, coverage or pricing of the two new services. Judging by their names and the stated purpose, the Register is moving from a search tool towards a regional data infrastructure for portfolio management and IP intelligence. J&C recommends that companies with filings across several ASEAN countries first use the existing Register to reconcile the status of their applications and registrations in each member state, and assess whether the new services can replace part of their third-party database searches once their functional descriptions are published.
