Diretrizes de registro e gestão de marcas de titularidade de instituições de ensino superior públicas brasileiras

Abstract

The production of knowledge by Brazilian Public Institutions of Higher Education (IPES) has been recognized as of great relevance for the country's socioeconomic and technological development. A preponderant factor in this process is the protection of creations and inventions through intellectual property rights (IP), as these are identified as mechanisms for adding value to knowledge and facilitating its availability for the benefit of society, through technology transfer. In Brazil, protection through trademark registration is guaranteed through Law 9,279, of May 14, 1996 — Industrial Property Law (LPI) — safeguarded by the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI), a federal agency responsible for executing the rules that regulate industrial property in Brazil. With the primary functions of identifying origin and distinguishing products or services from identical ones, trademarks are intangible rights that allow institutions to protect important and strategic assets as they engage in markets. In this strategic and highly relevant scenario for the IPES, especially for the Technological Innovation Centers (NIT), the objective of this work arises, proposing to elaborate guidelines for the registration and management of brands for the Brazilian IPES. Of a descriptive exploratory nature, the research aimed to identify the trademark profile of the IPES, in this case, of federal and state universities and federal institutes, mainly the reasons why the registration requests were filed, these, which served as the foundation for the construction of the guidelines, in the light of the LPI and the INPI trademark manual. Data collection was carried out between 05/20 and 05/30/2021, with a time frame from 1961 to 05/2021, starting with the identification of the IPES, through the e-MEC Portal. Once this was done, the search continued through the INPI portal to search for trademark deposits by the CNPJ number of each IPES. The results of this work pointed to the existence of 68 federal universities, 40 state universities and 41 federal institutes. A total of 2390 trademark registration requests were identified, of which: 1458 trademarks were actually registered, 115 requests were still being analyzed by the INPI and 817 requests were archived, motivated by: non-payment of fees, unregisterable trademark, formal requirement not met, no response to demands, withdrawal and nullity. Thus, it is possible to conclude that, in view of the survey and analysis of 60 years of trademark registration deposits, it was possible to construct a proposal for guidelines for registration and management of brands with great solidity, assertiveness and reliability, thus guaranteeing strategic support material in the management of IP in the innovation environments of the IPES, in the NITs. In addition to the guidelines, this work overflows into a strategic bias, in the light of the theories of the IP Atom, IP Continuous and Value Articulation, placing the trademark registration as an instrument capable of providing much more than the protection of the IP asset, but to provide conditions for extending the life of exclusivity of assets, consequently better negotiation and valuation conditions in technology transfer (TT) or licensing processes.