WIPO Lex-Judgments is already available*
On 24 September 2020, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched its new free database WIPO Lex-Judgments, which contains judicial decisions on IP matters from around the world.
The launch of WIPO Lex-Judgments was widely expected. As WIPO highlighted, the database “is a direct response to the needs expressed by numerous member states, initially from the Latin America and the Caribbean region (LAC region) and Spain”.
In this sense, the database provides valuable insights into the judgments and courts’ reasonings from different jurisdictions. Likewise, it sheds light on the judicial administration structures for IP disputes of some countries.
The access to the database is through the portal WIPO LEX, which already includes various IP laws and treaties worldwide.
So far, WIPO Lex-Judgments is available in 6 languages and contains over 400 decisions from ten countries: Australia (10 decisions), Brazil (36 decisions), Chile (50 decisions), China (30 decisions), Costa Rica (83 decisions), Jamaica (11 decisions), Mexico (76 decisions), Peru (72 decisions), Republic of Korea (20 decisions), and Spain (34 decisions).
WIPO emphasized that the judgments were “selected directly by the courts or other national authorities of each member state as leading decisions due to their significant impact or precedential value”. Likewise, the judgments were issued inter alia by the Supreme and specialized Courts as well as “administrative entities that carry out quasi-judicial functions”.
Even though the decisions are available in its original language, they can be reviewed in several languages with the automatic machine translation tools WIPO Translate and Google Translate.
The database allows searching for decisions per country; subject matter (e.g. copyright, patents, trademarks, enforcement of IP); issuing authority (e.g. Specialized Court on IP, Court of Appeal, Supreme Court); the level of the issuing authority (first, appellate, and final instance); type of procedure (administrative, civil, commercial, constitutional, administrative [judicial], criminal); relevant national legislation; relevant treaties; date of judgment; and relevant keywords.
When a judgment is reviewed, cross-references to the applicable national laws and international treaties are also available.
On top of this, an overview of judicial administration structures for IP disputes is also available on the profiles of China, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, Korea, and Spain. This section includes a brief explanation of the administrative and judicial procedures, IP-specific features, case statistics, and links to the official databases of the judgments.
It is expected that more decisions will continue to be added to the database. Thus, WIPO encourages Member States interested in contributing judgments to get in touch here.
*This article is based on the one published on The IPKat blog.
Sources: the press release published by WIPO and the database WIPO Lex-Judgments
