Academic response to the European Commission’s Questionnaire on the patent system in Europe: An economic approach

This paper presents an economic opinion on the questionnaire on the European patent system that was recently issued by the European Commission. We argue that the debate on patent reform in Europe needs to be more focused on its economic purpose, namely the promotion of innovation. As a first step we unfold sub-issues and trade-offs underlying the general and consensual goal which “promoting innovation” is. We contrast the protection and diffusion functions of the patent system, both of which must be taken into account in order to create an original European patent regime geared towards innovation. We also emphasize the possibility for the European patent system to answer more specific needs, such as those of small and medium enterprises or those of industries with highly cumulative innovations. We discuss as the second step the capacity of the European patent system to achieve these policy goals through various levers. We especially argue that patent fees or translation requirements should be viewed as policy instruments rather than as in a purely budgetary perspective. We moreover consider the positive or negative consequences one can expect from the coexistence of different patent systems in Europe.     

Patent and literature statistics – The case of optoelectronics

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of different statistical analyses from patent and literature databases that in combination are helpful for a variety of mostly strategic decision settings in firms. For the case of optoelectronics we assess the patenting and publishing activity of firms and individuals and their citation frequency.The analyses identified leading players in the field, revealed technological dependencies, and the existence of patent clusters as patenting strategies. Co-citation analysis highlighted technological similarities between two firms involved in patent litigation trials. In this science-based technology field individuals combining characteristics of key inventors (a high activity and citation level in patenting) as well as core scientists (a high activity and citation frequency level in publishing) – therefore labelled “R&D dualists” – successfully bridge the gap between science and technology, but are exceptionally rare. Citation-weighted patent counts demonstrated the pivotal impact of one “R&D dualist” in an industrial R&D laboratory, severely affecting the laboratories’ outcome when this individual left. An increasing level of R&D cooperation in particular technological subfields after the individual’s departure could be found. However, patent analysis did not find evidence for long-term competence transfer in these subfields.     

The rigour of EPO’s patentability criteria: An insight into the “induced withdrawals”

The EPO traditionally grants at least 60% of all patent applications, the rest being either withdrawn (30–35%) or refused (5%). This paper provides quantitative evidence suggesting that up to 54% of all patent withdrawals could be considered as induced by the work of EPO examiners, and hence may be taken as a more appropriate indicator of the rigour of the EPO. “Induced withdrawals” and refusals occur for up to 23% of all applications at the EPO. This share varies according to (1) the route chosen for an EPO filing; (2) the technological field that is considered; and (3) the country of residence of the assignee. The number of claims only slightly affects the share of withdrawals. However, on average, two additional claims induce an additional communication from the EPO, which in turn prolongs the procedural duration by an additional year.     

AIDB, the Italian Patent Information Users Group

The Italian Patent Information Users Group (AIDB—Associazione Italiana Documentalisti Brevettuali) was founded on February 24, 2004. At the end of that year, AIDB had 58 members, coming from different environments such as industry, private practice, public institutions, and content providers. During its first months of existence, AIDB coordinated various activities such as checking the extent and quality of documentation services offered by the Italian Patent and Trade Mark Office (UIBM), and promoting discussions about suitable certification schemes for professional patent searchers. In November 2004, AIDB organized a two-day national patent information conference, focused on the business impact of patent information and on the certification of patent searchers.     

Patent information from the Polish Patent Office

The Polish Patent Office activity within the scope of its patent information policy—with emphasis on the changes since the 1990s—is described. In addition to aspects of patent searching, such as documentation and databases, dissemination activities, for example education and training, and the role of Patent Information Centres, is covered. New challenges associated with the promotion of intellectual property protection and its role for the economy are also highlighted.     

Numbers and sizes of applicants at the European Patent Office

The evolution of numbers of applicants and the applicant size distributions in terms of numbers of patent filings are described for clients of the European Patent Office (EPO). Concentrating firstly on the period from 1999 to 2006, it is found that only about 35% of the applicants that file in one year then file again in the following year. However this percentage does not drop too much in further years because of a core group of large companies that persist in making considerable numbers of filings. It is mainly the applicants with small numbers of filings in a year that apply intermittently. A historical analysis is made since 1980 on applicant sizes in terms of Total filings. Breakdowns of the counts are considered by using a series of Size groups. The dynamics are studied via simple Markov chain stochastic process models for transitions between the Size groups. These involve a no-memory-assumption for approximating the probabilities of transitions for two and more years. Firstly, a general model is fitted. This allows a direct estimation to be made of the average remaining lifetime of continuous filing for an applicant that is already active. Then a “poisoned” model is fitted in which no further transitions are allowed back to filing after an applicant ceases to file. Finally, a five year windowed approach is taken to remove the influence of inactive applicants on the transition probabilities as far as possible. A comparative test suggests that the poisoned approach works best among the models that were tested. The discussion section considers policy implications and suggests ways to further develop the approach.     

A new patent processing suite for academic and research purposes

Patent databases are a counterpart of a technical encyclopedia providing a valuable informational source from patent documents. Patents apply to a wide variety of uses, and this is expanding. The increasing kinds of users of patent documents result in a lack of educational programs regarding this matter. This paper describes Patent2Net (P2N) a patentinformatic suite whose purpose is to fill the lack in the academic world (education and research) of a tool to use with students (STEM, Masters, PhD), by valuation services and for defining corpuses for research in general patent analysis, specifically on textual content. P2N is a free open-source modular, scalable, customizable and derivable tool, written in the python language. We present here the main functions of the tool and the technical aspects after discussing the skills to be reached by students for state of the art patent analysis.     

A survey on deep learning for patent analysis

Patent document collections are an immense source of knowledge for research and innovation communities worldwide. The rapid growth of the number of patent documents poses an enormous challenge for retrieving and analyzing information from this source in an effective manner. Based on deep learning methods for natural language processing, novel approaches have been developed in the field of patent analysis. The goal of these approaches is to reduce costs by automating tasks that previously only domain experts could solve. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of the application of deep learning for patent analysis. We summarize the state-of-the-art techniques and describe how they are applied to various tasks in the patent domain. In a detailed discussion, we categorize 40 papers based on the dataset, the representation, and the deep learning architecture that were used, as well as the patent analysis task that was targeted. With our survey, we aim to foster future research at the intersection of patent analysis and deep learning and we conclude by listing promising paths for future work.     

Patents as technological information in Latin America

This study shows the importance of patents as a source of technological information in Latin America. We studied the industrial property offices’ websites and the kind of patent information available such as laws, gazette, statistics, cost, forms, and contacts. We found at the USPTO and PCT websites the quantity of patent applications from applicants in Latin American countries filed in these offices. Brazil and Mexico in particular provide information on their websites to anyone interested in filing patent applications, searching patents and using patents as a source of technological information. This work shows that the quantity of patent applications is only slowly increasing in Latin America. Thus, each one of the 21 countries of Latin America needs to have a policy of dissemination of the importance of the patent system as a source of technological information to increase research and innovation in their countries.     

Determinants of patent withdrawals: Evidence from a sample of Italian applications with the EPO

This paper analyses the propensity to withdraw European patent applications within a regional sample of Italian applicants. The procedure for obtaining a granted patent from the EPO is composed of a series of sequential and selective steps imposing additional costs to the applicants. Accordingly, we argue that early withdrawals – i.e. those occurring before the proper examination process begins – should be treated separately from late withdrawals. Our findings show the probability of an early withdrawal is higher for applicants with lower resources and competencies and rises with the number of backward citations added by EPO examiners to the original application. Late withdrawals, instead, are negatively affected by one factor only: the size of patent family, which approximates the sunk costs born by applicants in order to extend the geographical scope of patent protection. Such a limited explanation suggests that the interventions of EPO examiners are likely to play a significant role in inducing late withdrawals.     

Searching the Patent Space

The Patent Space is a model to explain different kinds of patent searches in an illustrative and comprehensible way to laymen in the field of patents and patent searches, e.g. to customers like R + D staff or members of the Board. The most important kinds of patent searches are shown as examples of the applications of the ‘Patent Space’ concept.     

"Get Rich, or Die Trying": Lessons from Rambus' High-Risk Predatory Litigation in the Semiconductor Industry

Patent litigation is a visible and widespread feature of the semiconductor industry, as firms pursue judicial mechanisms to defend, or promote, their intellectual property portfolios. This study highlights the antecedents, strategic goals, tactics and outcomes of the most significant US trial of this type in the last decade, namely Rambus v. Infineon, whereby a smaller company (Rambus) successfully pursued a “do or die” litigation campaign against a larger rival, thus changing the rules of engagement for the semiconductor industry as a whole. This campaign is notable, not just because of its undoubted effects on the semiconductor industry, but because of the innovative nature of Rambus' strategy, which was extremely risky both in terms of its prospects of success and its potential damage to the company if it failed. Arguing that dominant logic and operating rules are important antecedents in the development and pursuit of patent litigation strategies, this paper analyses the Rambus case using a “dominant logic” and “effectuation” framework. Doing so demonstrates the innovative nature of Rambus' “high-risk predatory strategy”, the outcome of a dominant logic sustained by effectuation principles. The paper discusses the impact and significance of this new strategic form.     

The evolution of patent mining: Applying bibliometrics analysis and keyword network analysis

Text mining methods allow researchers to investigate technical documents (tech mining) and specifically explore patents for valuable information (patent mining. To the review literature and analyze the evolution of patent analysis and patent mining methods, bibliometrics analysis and keyword-based network analysis is applied on 143 papers extracted from the 'Web of science' database. Bibliometrics analysis was applied to determine top players researching in patent mining. Applying cluster analysis on the keyword network shows three main stages of patent analysis evolution. Also, it is discussed how patent mining is evolutionized in terms of information retrieval, pattern recognition and pattern analysis.     

Zipf's law applications in patent landscape analysis

New business insights are shown to be extractable from patent landscapes by the mathematical method of discrete Pareto analysis. By applying to patent publication distributions, a method analogous to that proposed by the linguist George Kingsley Zipf, metrics and methods of visualization are introduced which quantify scale, dominance and consolidation of a patent landscape. The key results of the method are illustrated in the Zipf plot of assignee patent publication count versus assignee rank for the lithography patent landscape shown below.     

A proposed framework for the certification of the patent information professional

Gone are the days of exclusive access to esoteric patent information databases or rummaging through a classification box of patent publications in order to identify prior art. Patent information is now widely and freely available to all. Although the availability of patent information will likely facilitate future innovation, the access is resulting in a wide range of skills and competencies among those who search and interpret patent information. The time has come to standardise these skills and to devise a certification scheme so that the art of patent searching and analysis is entrenched as a profession for many years to come. This article reviews the progress towards such a scheme, and explains the current PIUG proposal, a key element of which is a three tiered examination structure.     

PIZnet, the joint Internet site for German patent information centres

The objective of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Patentinformationszentren e.V. (The Association of German Patent Information Centres) is to encourage the ongoing development of the centres and to achieve broader public dissemination of industrial property rights information. Since use of the Internet has steadily increased amongst wide sections of the public in recent years, and since patent offices have taken steps to give the public free access to patent information, the association has set up a Germany-wide network known as PIZnet (“PIZ” standing for “patent information centres” in German) in co-operation with the Federal Printing Office. This network includes a presentation on all German patent information centres and the services they provide, it answers questions on the patent system, publishes offers of licences, and covers much else besides.     

Precision viticulture: The state of the art

The growth and collection of grapes or Viticulture is essential for producing various consumer products. Herein, we identified patents registered in the viticulture and wine areas, extracted specific information such as the applicant, country of origin and patent classification and analyzed the collected data. The filing frequencies and maps according to country and applicant were generated. Our analysis revealed two large patent groups and demonstrated that China is the top patent-producing country, rapidly acquiring substantial viticulture-related intellectual property. This study provides insights into the state of the art in viticulture and could be also be used to evaluate other business sectors.     

Composite value index of patent indicators: Factor analysis combining bibliographic and survey datasets

The article relates to a patent value composite index that combines twenty different patent indicators according to several dimensions: patent breadth and technology potential, prior art and background of the invention, and filing and procedural aspects of a patent. A novel selection approach of patent indicators and their validation with market value of patents is advanced, whereas the computation of the composite value index is based on the factor analysis methodology firstly proposed in the literature by Lanjouw and Schankerman (2004).This study reports several new findings. Firstly, three common factors are obtained in correspondence to the respective three dimensions of the patent indicators. Secondly, the proposed composite value index can effectively summarize the information conveyed by every single indicator, because the reduction of the goodness-of-fit of the market value model is very limited as compared to the case of the indicators taken separately. Thirdly, a robustness analysis of the composite value index was conducted, relying on post-grant information, such as opposition and renewal decisions, and the results are consistent with the market value model with the composite value index solely considered. More generally, these findings contribute to the research agenda on proposing novel timely indicators of innovation activities.     

The patent activities of Korea and Taiwan: a comparative case study of patent statistics

This paper examines the patent grant rate of Korea and Taiwan by using the country-level patent statistics of Korea, Taiwan and USA during the period of 1988–1998. The patent grant rate means the rate of US patent grants to the applications filed in USA during the investigated years. To measure the grant rate, a model was developed for the methodological procedure. In the framework of the model, the process of patent dynamics in these countries shows different patterns. The financial crisis of Korea in 1998–1999 influenced the number of domestic patent applications by Koreans, resulting in the rapid decrease. The US patent application rate by Koreans, however, was not affected, keeping the average rate of applications at 7.5% of the Korean applications during the investigated period. The rate of US patent grants by Koreans in the early 1990s dropped, which can be explained by the change of patent strategy of Samsung Elec. Co. Ltd.Taiwan, on the other hand, had filed 160% more US patent applications than its own domestic applications. The authors suggest that this is attributable to some US patent applications corresponding to Taiwanese domestic applications for utility models, and that this may be a factor in the lower rate of Taiwanese US patent grants (average 53.4%) than that of Koreans (average 66.3%). The rate of US patent grants by Taiwanese has constantly increased, while that for Koreans has fluctuated; the authors conjecture that this implies that Taiwanese patent management for the US patents has improved.     

Towards TRIPs compliance in India: The Patents Amendment Act 1999 and implications

India has pledged full compliance with the TRIPS Uruguay round by the year 2004. This article documents the actions taken so far, principally through the Patent Amendment Act of 1999. In particular, the “mailbox” facility and Exclusive Marketing Rights (EMR) in respect of pharmaceutical type products are described. EMR provides “temporary protection”, until such patents are examined (from the beginning of 2005). The differences in the scope to oppose or revoke a granted patent compared to the very limited scope to take such action on an EMR are discussed. Other issues touched on are compulsory licensing, widening of the definition of working a patent in India, and infringement. In December 1999 several Bills related to Trade Marks, Designs, Copyright (amendment), Geographical indications (Protection & Registration), Protection of Plant Varieties & Farmers were passed in both the houses of Parliament. A Second Patents (amendment) Bill was introduced in December 1999 to comply with other requirements of TRIPS which is presently under review. The article concludes with a detailed review of recent patenting activity in India in the key technical areas of the Drugs, Pharmaceutical and Agrochemical Sector, the Electronics, Telecommunications and IT Sector, and the Foods Sector.