The Spanish experience in the field of technological information

The article describes the new patent information services which are being developed in the Spanish Office following adoption in 1986 of a New Patent Act. The services are largely based on data obtained from the new computer system on which all information concerning applications and documents entering the office is recorded. The services include:

1. a Technical Information Gazette including bibliographic information of granted Spanish patents with an abstract and the most significant drawing;
2. publication of the Industrial Property Official Gazette in paper, microfiche and on magnetic tape;
3. a version in Spanish of the IPC;

online services based on the administrative database SITADEX, bibliographic database of Spanish patents CIBERPAT, a phonetic trademark database INPAMAR, a CLINPAT database containing the complete text in Spanish of the IPC; a LATIPAT database containing bibliographic information of Latin-American patents; and a GRAFMAR database of trademarks in graphics.     

Chinese patent applications reach six figures in 1996

Since the Chinese Patent Office started accepting patent applications on 1 April 1985, the yearly patent application number has increased steadily, although a sluggish period appeared later. The Office expected to reach the 100,000 year mark in the last year of the century, that also will be the end of the national “Ninth Five-year Plan” period. However, the promotion of science and technology and the sustained and rapid economic growth in the country have shown China to be a huge potential market, and this has contributed to a recent sharp increase in patent applications both from home and abroad. The number of applications filed in 1996 reached 102,735, 23.7% higher than the total number of 83,044 made in 1995. Of the 1996 applications, 80% came from domestic applicants and 20% were of foreign origin. The Chinese Patent Office granted 43,780 patents in the same year. A faster examination process of better quality and a more efficient overall administration procedure were scheduled at the Patent Office in order to cope with the new challenge.     

Patent information services of the Swiss Federal Intellectual Property Office (SIPO)

The patent information services offered by the Swiss Federal Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) are discussed. These services comprise: information from the SIPO computer about patent applications or patents relating to Switzerland and Liechtenstein; patent document collections available in the reading room of SIPO; access to databases made available by the European Patent Office (EPO); access to external scientific, technical and patent databases via the Technical Information Service Patents (TIPAT); patent and other document delivery services.     

Abridgments of British patents — The end of an era

The Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852 and the coming into being of the “modern” British Patent Office is briefly mentioned. In 1852 Bennet Woodcroft F.R.S. was appointed Superintendent of the specifications and it was his idea to publish abridgments of each patent specification so that searches could be readily conducted in the Patent Office Library (or at home if the abridgments were purchased). The four series of abridgments covering the years from 1617 (or earlier in some cases) to the present day are described. Patent applications currently being published under the Patents Act 1977 contain abstracts of the specification on their front pages and there are several important differences between these abstracts and all the earlier series of abridgments. These differences are discussed and commented on and it is found that there are both advantages and disadvantages in the new system.     

Computer based publishing in the Australian patent office

The Australian Patent Office has a legislative requirement to publish particulars of patent, trade mark and design activity within Australia. Drawings, text, images and other data for trade marks, patents and designs are printed weekly in the Official Journals (Gazettes).In 1985/86 the Office investigated the possibilities of computer based processing for its regular weekly publications. The investigation considered how best to hold and retrieve text data, how patent, trade mark and design images might be processed and what computer based publishing software and hardware could be used to lower overall Office publishing costs.Following the investigation the Australian Patent Office developed a publishing system using ADABAS to hold text data, OLIVETTI's FILENET optical disk system to hold images, the XEROX ‘XICS’ software system to produce typesetting masters and a XEROX 9700 laser printer to print high quality output.On 1 January 1987 the patent and trademarks weekly journals were issued for the first time using a computer database of text for both journals and of images for the trademark journal. The text and images are merged by the XICS typesetting package and printed on the XEROX 9700 laser printer. The new publications are easier to produce, are of a higher quality and have been well received by subscribers. As a result of the computerisation the Office's publication costs for the Journals have been reduced substantially.This article describes how this system was developed and implemented, the benefits achieved by the Office and identifies likely future directions.     

Patent analysis of genetic engineering research in Japan,Korea and Taiwan

The aim of this study is to reveal the research growth, the distribution of research productivity and impact of genetic engineering research in Japan, Korea and Taiwan by taking patent bibliometrics approach. This study uses quantitative methods adopt from bibliometrics to analyze the patents granted to Japan, Korea and Taiwan by United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 1991 to 2002. In addition to patent and citation count, Bradford’s Law is applied to identify core assignees in genetic engineering. Patent coupling approach is taken to further analyze the patents granted to the core assignees to enclose the correlations among the core assignees. 13,055 genetic engineering patents were granted during the period of 1991 to 2002. Japan, Korea and Taiwan own 841 patents and Japan owns most of them. 270 assignees shared 841 patents and 16 core assignees are identified by the Bradford’s Law. 18,490 patents were cited by the 13,055 patents and 1,146 out of the 18,490 cited patents were granted to Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The results show Japan performs best in productivity and research impact among three countries. The core assignees are also Japan based institutions and four technical clusters are identified by patent coupling.     

Patent activity on water pollution and treatment in China—a scientometric perspective

This research intends to investigate the patent activity on water pollution and treatment in China (1985–2007), and then compares the results with patents data about Triadic patents, South Korea, Brazil and India over the same periods, patents data were collected from Derwent World Patents Index between 1985 and May 2008. For this study, 169,312 patents were chosen and examined. Total volume of patents, technology focus, assignee sector, priority date and the comparison with other countries are analyzed. It is found that patents on water pollution and treatment filed at China have experienced a remarkable increase and the increase rate of patents filed at China change simultaneous with the percentage of domestic applications. However, the number of high quality Triadic patents with priority country as China remains small. Furthermore, in addition to individual patent assignees, both Chinese universities and enterprises also play important roles in patent activity of water pollution and treatment. In addition, the pattern of South Korea’s development can provide short-term implications for China and the regularity in Triadic patents’ development can provide some guidance to China’s long-term development. In contrast, the development pattern of Brazil and India is less influential to China’s development. Furthermore, China’s technology focuses on water pollution and treatment seem to parallel global and triadic patent trends. This research provides a comprehensive picture of China’s innovation capability in the area of water pollution and treatment. It will help China’s local governments to improve their regional S&T capability and will provide support the National Water Pollution Control and Treatment Project in China.     

Patent analyses in the changed legal regime of the US Patent Law since 2001

In 2001, a new ruling for the publication of patent applications at the United States Patent and Trademark Office came into effect. Since then, all applications which are also filed with foreign offices have to be published 18 months after the application date, in analogy to the ruling in Europe and Japan. This new regime replaces the former system where only granted patents were published. With about 70% of all applications the share of pre-grant publications of applications of US origin is quite high, allowing new types of statistical analysis. In particular, the investigations of time series based on priority years instead of grant years can thus be performed much more topically. On the one hand, a larger dataset for applications of US origin is available; on the other hand, the sample of applications from Asian countries is generally much larger at the US Patent Office than at the European Patent Office. Despite these new opportunities, searches at low levels of aggregation by codes of the International Patent Classification still have to be handled with care.     

US Alien Property Custodian patent documents: A legacy prior art collection from World War II – Part 1. History

In 1943, at the height of World War II, the US Patent Office, by the authorization of the Alien Property Custodian (APC), published 2964 pending patent applications that had been seized from nationals of enemy and enemy-occupied countries. This unusual act – only in 2001 did the USPTO begin routinely publishing some pending patent applications – was prompted by the APC’s wartime mandate to make enemy technology available to American industry. During and after the war many of these applications were issued as patents assigned to the APC. However, up to 58% were abandoned, becoming, in effect, orphan documents. APC documents, although they resemble contemporary patents and are granted prior art status by the USPTO, are virtually unknown today, even among patent professionals. This two-part paper investigates the origins, history and profile of this unique collection of prior art documents. Part one reviews the wartime organization and activities of the Office of the Alien Property Custodian, the agency responsible for the creation of APC documents, the use of vesting orders to seize patents and the APC’s patent portfolio. Part two describes applications published by the APC, their national and technological profiles, and snapshots of the inventors and companies who lost and, in some cases, regained their patent rights.     

The international preliminary examination of patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty — a proxy for patent value?

One way to achieve international patent protection is to file patents via the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). The application process therein can be divided into two phases, those represented by chapters I and II of the PCT. According to the literature, patent applications filed via chapter II of the Treaty tend to be more valuable. The results presented in this paper suggest that in general this assumption is not justified. The analyses further revealed that for practitioners seeking fast patent protection at the European Patent Office (EPO) via the PCT, the choice should be chapter II of the PCT, with the EPO as preliminary examination authority.     

The new form of the Netherlands patent bulletin De Industriële Eigendom

The official patent bulletin published by the Netherlands Patent Office, which is called De Industriële Eigendom (Industrial Property), used to appear in two separate parts, one dealing with published applications as filed, and the other with applications published after examination and patents granted. Since 1982 these two parts are published together and a third part dealing with European patents granted and valid for The Netherlands was added.Also the timing of the publication and the lay-out of a number of headings in the bulletin was modified and its outward appearance was modernized. The accessibility of the bulletin to foreigners was increased by the addition of explanatory notes in English.After some historic background information, the nature of the modifications is described and some information is given about the experiences gained in effectuating the changes.     

The technical information provided by the European Patent Office

The search documentation of the European Patent Office at the Hague is essentially used in view of the tasks carried out within the framework of the European Patent Convention and the PCT and also for the preparation of search reports with respect to national applications filed in France, The Netherlands, Switzerland and Turkey. Moreover the general public can indirectly benefit from this search documentation through the standard or special search services. The standard searches are carried out on the basis of granted patents or patent applications (published or not) in compliance with the guidelines established for the European searches; the standard search report is identical to the European search report. The special services of the EPO encompass searches on: the state of the art, infringement, inventories, monographs, designed to respond to a great variety of needs.In the near future, the EPO will provide a direct access to its technical information through EURONET.     

Assessing the value of patent portfolios: an international country comparison

Patent counts have been extensionally used to measure the innovative capacities of countries. However, since economic values of patents may differ, simple patent counts may give misleading rankings, if the patents of one country are on average more valuable than those of another. In the literature several methods have been proposed, which shall adjust for these differences. However, often these do not possess a solid economic micro-foundation and therefore are often ad-hoc and arbitrary procedures. In this paper, we intend to present an adjustment method that is based on the analysis of renewal decisions. The method builds on the theoretical model used in Schankerman and Pakes (1986) and Besson (2008) but goes beyond both approaches in that it recovers the important long tail of the value distribution. It also transfers Besson’s (2008) econometric methodology (applicable to the organisational structures of the US Patent and Trademark Office) also to the European Patent Office which is necessary, since each application here may split up into several national patent documents. The analysis is performed for 22 countries. Exemplarily, we find that in the cohort of 1986 patent applications, Danish patents are about 60% more valuable than the average patent. German patents are a bit below average. Japanese patents are of least value. In the cohort of 1996, Danish patents lose some of their lead but are still more valuable than the average. While German are a bit above average, Japanese patents even fall further behind (possibly due to the economic downturn in since the mid of 1990ies).     

Japanese submarine patents: examined patents within a year of filing!

Changes to the criteria for accelerated examination in the Japanese Patent Office have resulted in some examined applications never appearing as A documents, being first published as B1 documents, often very quickly. The article explores the implications of this change for all involved in searching and using Japanese patent information. For example, coverage of these patents is very sparse outside of Japanese-language commercial patent databases. In addition, they are granted almost exclusively to Japanese applicants. They are concentrated in electronics and telecommunications. Numbers at present are about 7000 annually.     

Reaping the Benefits of Patenting Activities: Does the Size of Patentees Matter?

This paper is based upon a survey on a regional sample of Italian inventors who, between 1991 and 2005, were named in patent applications filed at the European Patent Office. Their features and patenting activities are examined in relation to the size of their organizations. Compared to those from medium and large companies, the inventors working in small firms are less productive in terms of patent applications. However, according to different indicators, it emerges that there is no difference in the average quality of patented inventions of the two groups. Nevertheless, one-third of small applicants evaluates negatively its patenting experience, while this is true for only a tiny fraction of larger patentees. On the basis of further interviews, we find that these assessments are particularly influenced by the different capacity to enforce patent rights.     

Patent coupling analysis of primary organizations in genetic engineering research

The aim of this study is to reveal the possible linkage among the 40 primary organizations in Genetic Engineering Research by taking the Patent Coupling approach. The primary organizations were defined by the productivity and identified by the patent count and Bradford Law. The author analyzed the cited patents of the patents granted by United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 1991 to 2002 to the 40 primary organizations (assignees) in Genetics Engineering Research to establish the correlation. 780 coupling pairs formed by the 40 primary organizations and Coupling Index and Coupling Strength were calculated for each pair and primary organization. Correlation Analysis and Multiple-Dimension Scaling were applied further based on Coupling Index. Technological clusters were found in the results of the analyses.     

Identification of US-pharmaceutical patents expiring between 2018 and 2022 and their effect on the Brazilian domestic market

This work presents the status, in Brazil, of pharmaceutical patents granted by US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and their role on the Brazilian Pharmaceutical market. Data show that 27.1% of the US-granted patents filed in Brazil are granted by Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial (INPI) and 76.5% of them have their term extended due to provision of article 40 of the Brazilian Industrial Property Law (LPI 9279/96), while 65% of these US-patents are not valid in Brazil, evidencing market openness and independence of patent examination of INPI before USPTO. The effects of INPI backlog of patent examination on pharmaceutical market are also highlighted. These aspects are relevant to stablish better strategies to reduce backlog and to orient public policies to stimulate the Brazilian industry, especially with respect to the production of generic and similar drugs.     

Identifying rapidly evolving technological trends for R&;D planning using SAO-based semantic patent networks

Patents constitute an up-to-date source of competitive intelligence in technological development; thus, patent analysis has been a vital tool for identifying technological trends. Patent citation analysis is easy to use, but fundamentally has two main limitations: (1) new patents tend to be less cited than old ones and may miss citations to contemporary patents; (2) citation-based analysis cannot be used for patents in databases which do not require citations. Naturally, citation-based analysis tends to underestimate the importance of new patents and may not work in rapidly-evolving industries in which technology life-cycles are shortening and new inventions are increasingly patented world-wide. As a remedy, this paper proposes a patent network based on semantic patent analysis using subject-action-object (SAO) structures. SAO structures represent the explicit relationships among components used in a patent, and are considered to represent key concepts of the patent or the expertise of the inventor. Based on the internal similarities between patents, the patent network provides the up-to-date status of a given technology. Furthermore, this paper suggests new indices to identify the technological importance of patents, the characteristics of patent clusters, and the technological capabilities of competitors. The proposed method is illustrated using patents related to synthesis of carbon nanotubes. We expect that the proposed procedure and analysis will be incorporated into technology planning processes to assist experts such as researchers and R&D policy makers in rapidly-evolving industries.