GENEVA (AP) — Royalty and licensing fees paid by businesses globally have boomed over the past four decades to at least $180 billion (€132 billion) a year, the U.N. intellectual property agency said Monday.

That's a more than 60-fold increase in the amount of such fees paid since 1970, when they fetched $2.8 billion a year, the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, said.

"So this is a significant indication of the importance of knowledge markets, technology markets," said Francis Gurry, the agency's director general.

Despite Europe's debt woes, the U.N. report finds high-income countries such as France, Germany, Japan, Britain and the United States still file the most patent requests. Together, those countries account for 70 percent of global research and development spending.

But the report also notes that "the geography of innovation has shifted" — to China, in paricular.

In 1993, U.S. companies accounted for 36.8 percent of global R&D, Japan had 16.5 percent and Germany had 8.6 percent, France, 5.9 percent, and Britain, 4.8 percent. China accounted for 2.2 percent.

But by 2009, the U.S. share had shrunk to 33.4 percent, Japan to 11.5 percent, Germany to 6.7 percent, France, 3.8 percent, and Britain, 3.3 percent. China's spending on R&D had jumped to 12.8 percent, WIPO's first-ever annual report finds.

Among universities, it says, the most patents were filed in China, Brazil, India and South Africa between 1980 and 2010.

The growth in patents has led to what WIPO estimates was a backlog of 5.17 million unprocessed patent applications last year. The backlog is particularly large in Japan and the U.S., WIPO says. As of four years ago, the average U.S. wait had risen to 32 months, up from 21.5 months in 1996.

Its report says "at least some innovating companies are bound to suffer from long delays in the patenting process" amid the competition to push out new products, but others might benefit from the wait if they have long product life cycles and a lot of uncertainty about market developments.

(Source: newsok.com)