A new type of ethical violation has been discovered by scientific integrity experts: researchers at Indian universities are paying fraudulent companies in the country to make them appear as the holders of product design registrations, which are protected by the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO). Although the Indian academics had no creative involvement in the designs, which are often not even original drawings, they earn them points in evaluation processes and can lead to benefits in the form of salaries and promotions.
The scheme exploits vulnerabilities in India’s university reward system, which does not distinguish between this type of registration and a formal patent, as well as taking advantage of gaps in UK legislation, which aims to reduce the time and bureaucracy needed to protect designs by analyzing aesthetic and not technical aspects. “The UK allows artists to protect their designs relatively cheaply and easily, without the arduous and expensive process of obtaining a formal patent,” Emily Hudson, an intellectual property expert at the University of Oxford, told the journal Science.
The scammers advertise registrations for sale as “design patents,” a category in the US intellectual property system that is more difficult to obtain because it also involves an assessment of originality and innovation. The designs they sell, however, are often crude or bizarre and are highly unlikely to have any commercial value. One, for example, is an image of a shoe with a camera and USB ports around the sole, presented as an innovation for the visually impaired. Another is a device supposedly capable of diagnosing skin cancer, the design of which is merely a Glock pistol with a screen behind the trigger. “They are so lazy they even reuse identical images from old filings on new filings,” wrote Brett Trout, a US patent attorney, on his blog. A simple straight-lined drawing of a pickup truck with solar panels installed on the roof and hood, for example, was registered as a “solar-powered AI vehicle.”
“It’s basically a double fraud—these people aren’t inventors and these are not patents,” Sarah Fackrell, a professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law who coauthored a study that uncovered this type of misconduct, told Times Higher Education (THE). The paper was shared on the European Union’s Zenodo preprint archive and accepted for publication by International Journal for Educational Integrity. Two of the authors, biologist Reese Richardson of Northwestern University, USA, and scientific fraud expert Nick Wise of the University of Cambridge, UK, discovered the new scam while investigating a similar type of academic fraud known as paper mills: illegal services that sell authorship of (usually fake) scientific articles. While monitoring profiles advertising these services on websites and apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram, researchers noticed that they were also advertising IPO-approved design registrations for between 2,000 and 30,000 Indian rupees (from R$140 to R$2,000). The advertisements explicitly stated that this type of intellectual property was worth points in India’s academic ranking system.
Richardson and Wise then searched for the advertised designs at the UK patent office and found drawings they described as “childish,” some of them inspired by images already available in the public domain. The next step was to analyze the filings submitted in the previous two years. They found approximately 2,000 suspicious designs registered by at least eight fake companies owned by academics or universities in India. “This practice demonstrates that established firms in the global economy of academic and education fraud are actively expanding into new markets and diversifying their services,” Richardson told THE. He emphasizes that academic integrity experts should consider thesis and essay ghostwriting, the purchase of articles produced by paper mills, and the sale of design patents as offers in the same marketplace. “As we demonstrate, these services are often offered side by side.”
The study authors made a series of recommendations on how to curb this type of misconduct. The main one is that universities should carefully examine information about the intellectual property of their researchers, to ensure they only reward those responsible for truly innovative patents and industrial designs. Another suggestion is that governments and patent offices should investigate individuals who register a large number of designs or who link many authors to the same registration.
The researchers highlight the harm this type of scientific misconduct causes to the intellectual property protection system, contaminating its archives with meaningless and useless drawings and damaging its reputation. “These firms are exploiting people using state resources in the UK. Authorities should use whatever means necessary to put a stop to this practice,” Richardson said. Identifying fraudulent services can be more complicated than it seems; unlike with scientific articles, it is not illegal to sell intellectual property of designs. In an email sent to the journal Science, an IPO spokesperson stressed that designs can legitimately be bought and sold and that it would not be appropriate to comment on cases that occur in jurisdictions outside the UK.
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