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.     

A paperless patent documentation and information centre to assist in the transfer of technology to non-industrialized countries

Non-industrialized countries desiring to provide patent documentation and information services should seek cooperation with countries having similar backgrounds to form a regional patent documentation and information centre. This centre should supply bibliographic patent information, copies of patent documents, SDI services, state-of-the-art searches and novelty searches.A paper based patent collection is not feasible in view of the workload involved (more than 300 man-yr) and the necessary storage capacity (15 km of paper documents). Consequently microform and EDP facilities should be used whenever convenient.To provide information on patent documents of the member countries a centralized bibliographic data base and a complete collection of patent documents in microform should be established. Information on patent documents of other countries should be obtained from existing worldwide bibliographic data bases, and from search files existing elsewhere.Patent collections in microform of the most important countries should be acquired and for certain fields of high regional interest inhouse search files could be established.     

技术标准、专利与技术创新的联动模式研究

伴随着＂创新技术专利化、专利技术标准化、技术标准国际化＂趋势,技术标准已成为技术创新链条的重要环节,成为产业竞争的重要手段,成为区域经济发展的重要引擎,成为抢占经济社会发展的战略制高点,成为国与国之间利益博弈的重要手段。本文从技术标准、专利与技术创新的相关理论出发,重点就技术标准、专利与技术创新的内在联系和联动模式进行阐述,并提出促进技术标准、专利与技术创新产生联动效应的相关对策。     

References to literature in patent documents: A case study of CSIR in India

Summary The paper examines the use of references by applicants and the examiners in US patent documents by R&D scientists from CSIR in India. It observes that scientists in CSIR use higher inputs of scientific information than the technical information in patenting. The examiners do make their own prior art search and add significantly to the patent and non-patent literature, which is distinctly different from the references given by the R&D scientists from CSIR. It identifies (a) the major disciplines and the sub-disciplines that contribute most of the scientific knowledge, and (b) the countries from where most references to patent literature are made. The applicants cite relatively less recent patent literature and more medium-term patent literature in comparison to citations by examiners. The paper observes that there is scope of improvement in making relevant prior art search, particularly, for patent literature by R&D scientists and in planning and organizing the information support for conducting patentable R&D in CSIR.     

Collections of patent documentation and the way Soviet specialists need them

The patent documentation system of the USSR comprise collections at four levels: the very comprehensive collections of the All-Union Patent-Technical Library (VPTB); industry branch oriented files; regional files; and local files of organization and factories. The files of VPTB form the basis for producing abstracts in Russian of foreign inventions, for microfilming industrial designs and utility models of several countries and for issuing various reference and information retrieval publications. The other three categories of files serve, as their names suggest, the needs of specific branches or organizations or are all-purpose files serving a whole region. The system of patent files is continuously upgraded as regards its functions and the services offered. The philosophy governing this as well as techniques for selecting patent documents to be required are described in the article. As in many other countries, there are no libraries in the USSR which exclusively collect files of patent documents (with the exception of the libraries of patent and invention offices). Until recently the All-Union Patent-Technical Library (VPTB) has been practically the sole establishment of this kind. In the early sixties, however, the facilities and collections of VPTB proved to be insufficient to satisfy the public requirements for patent documentation, rapidly growing in this country. This period was marked by efforts directed towards the creation of regional and sectorial files ofm patent documents for the specialists in industry and science. When these files were created the nature, purpose and peculiar features of industrial property documents was fully taken into account. At the same time, important decisions were taken, concerning the setting up of the State system of patent documentation files, the problems of controlling the process of forming the files became highly important. In the system of patent documentation being established, the industry branch oriented and regional files collected within the central bodies of scientific and technical information (STI) have become the major components. They provide facilities for conducting thorough patent searches to specialists of the industrial ministries and organizations of the country, irrespective of where the enterprise or organization is located. At the present stage, the structural arrangement of the patent documentation system is represented by collections at four levels: The first or higher level — VPTB. The collections here comprehensively represent the files of domestic and foreign patent documents over an unlimited period of time. The second level — industry branch oriented files; they cover exhaustively their respective industry sectors, mainly backlogged over the period of renewal of industrial products; they are primarily represented by patent documents of the countries where the industry sector of interest is highly developed. The third level — regional files, of all-purpose character. They are compiled of patent documentation of the major industrially or economically developed nations and offer facilities for conducting various comprehensive patent-related studies, including patent clearance searches. The fourth level — local files of organizations and factories compiled according to their specific needs; the period, fields and countries covered — all this is determined in accordance with the general layout of the respective branch-oriented file; local files are thus the source of specialized scientific and technical information of the organization or factory concerned.     

The activities of the Swiss watch industry in the fields of patent information and documentation

The rapid technological evolution has caused an increased demand for patent information in the Swiss watch industry, which is catered for by the Swiss Documentation Centre in the Field of Microtechnology. The Centre maintains a library with a computer terminal for on-line searches, and issues several series of publications; weekly and monthly bulletins; translations of relevant Japanese patent documents and file cards with abstracts of patents on horology issued by the most important countries. The latter amounts to about 2600 cards per year with information on approximately 1000 new inventions. To make retrieval of the cards easier a system of index cards is also maintained.     

G.D.R. patent information system promotes the creation of modern high technologies as well as of complex innovation processes

The article explains the importance attached in the G.D.R. to patent information for formulating and solving R&D tasks. The G.D.R. Office for Inventions and Patents is responsible for the patent information system, which comprises information centres in industries, in various regions of the country and in the Office itself. Specialists engaged in R&D have easy access to patent literature, and the various services provided by the system are described in detail. Building up of the information service is assisted by close co-operation with the U.S.S.R. and other C.M.E.A. member-states. Further development of the system involves the creation of electronic databases containing the bibliographic data and abstracts of the patent documents of the G.D.R. and other major industrialized countries and extension of the network of polytechnic patent libraries with improvement of their services.     

基于可视化的真空镀膜装备专利竞争技术分析

针对当前中国精密真空镀膜装备技术与国外差距甚远,存在核心技术缺失、技术发展方向不明确、研发意愿不足等问题,基于可视化技术分析真空镀膜装备国内外专利信息。探索数据处理过程中,通过字段创建与组合以可视化解析当前专利态势和技术,聚焦技术壁垒背景下光学领域磁控溅射(MS)与半导体领域原子层沉积(ALD)国外重点装备制造厂商的技术关注,挖掘出关键部件专利布局、技术功效、专利空白、比较优势等竞争信息,由桑基图、实物图、簇状气泡图等可视化图像直观展现分析成果,以期为中国真空镀膜装备制造企业技术创新思路借鉴、企业并购、技术合作、人才引进及产业相关政策制定提供参考策略。     

The patent system and the medium-sized industry

The statistics of the German Patent Office reveal that the majority of patent applications are filed by small and medium-sized industries (SMI) or private inventors and so confirm the importance of this sector for the technological innovation. However, many SMI do not make full use of the possible protection patenting offers them, and the importance for SMI of exploiting the patent literature as a source of technical information has only recently been acknowledged. There are many possible explanations of this reticence on the part of SMI, a number of them are analysed in the article, together with the advantages of patent protection. It is concluded that the Patent Office ought to make an effort to make access to its stock of information easier and more effective.     

The use of patent information for the identification of development trends

The publications on a specific technical field issued by the patent officers within a certain period of time do not only reflect the inventive activities and the “production” of new technical knowledge in a country, but also signalize forthcoming industrial activities and therefore indicate new technological trends. The focal points of these inventive activities may e.g. be ascertained from the bibliographical data on published patent applications compiled according to the International Patent Classification. These data also provide information on the granting of existing and imminent patents in the different industrial countries.     

Patent information retrieval: approaching a method and analysing nanotechnology patent collaborations

Many challenges still remain in the processing of explicit technological knowledge documents such as patents. Given the limitations and drawbacks of the existing approaches, this research sets out to develop an improved method for searching patent databases and extracting patent information to increase the efficiency and reliability of nanotechnology patent information retrieval process and to empirically analyse patent collaboration. A tech-mining method was applied and the subsequent analysis was performed using Thomson data analyser software. The findings show that nations such as Korea and Japan are highly collaborative in sharing technological knowledge across academic and corporate organisations within their national boundaries, and China presents, in some cases, a great illustration of effective patent collaboration and co-inventorship. This study also analyses key patent strengths by country, organisation and technology.     

Analysis of developing a specific technological field using the theme code of Japanese patent information

The paper was to establish an easy and effective method to investigate and develop a specific technological field from Japanese patent information. The walking technique of the biped humanoid robot was used as an example to study the relative research capabilities and patent citation conditions for patent owners and patent map by the searching method of the theme code for FI (File Index) and F-term classification system of the Japanese Patent Office (JPO). A formulated technical matrix of patent map was established to indicate that the ZMP (Zero Moment Point) control means was the main technology to achieve stabilized walking control of the humanoid biped robot. This method can aid to establish a specific technological matrix from the specific selected term codes (single viewpoint or multiple viewpoints) of the F-term list in the theme code of the JPO system through Boolean logical operations. The resulting particular technical fields were developed to improve the technological capability or seek the merging technology opportunities.     

Citation rates to technologically important patents

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the average number of citations received by issued U.S. patents from subsequently issued U.S. patents is higher for patents associated with important technological advances than for a group of randomly selected patents. Analysis of examiners' citations to 100 selected patents showed that these selected patents, which underlay technically important products, were more than twice as frequently cited (significance level of 0.0001) as a randomly selected set of 102 control patents. This finding provides strong evidence for the hypothesis that patent citation data can be used in technological indicators development, and in technological policy analysis, since it implies that the location and analysis of groups of highly cited patents can provide a valid indicator of patent areas of technical importance.     

Patents as a source of scientific and technical information in developing nations

Characteristics of patent documents, recent changes in them, and recent external developments designed to facilitate the use of patent documents are detailed to support the suggestion that patents are potentially a primary source of scientific and technical information available to developing nations. Comparison to the journal literature is made.     

从竞争情报视角研究超级电容器产业的技术竞争态势

利用德温特创新索引(DII)数据库的专利文献数据,通过产业竞争环境分析和主要竞争对手分析,从竞争情报的视角研究了超级电容器产业的技术竞争态势。通过计算专利技术生命周期、技术研发重点、主要专利优先权国家分布、主要研发机构等指标,明确了我国在该技术领域的位置,提出了发展我国超级电容器产业对策和建议。     

Identifying patent infringement using SAO based semantic technological similarities

Companies should investigate possible patent infringement and cope with potential risks because patent litigation may have a tremendous financial impact. An important factor to identify the possibility of patent infringement is the technological similarity among patents, so this paper considered technological similarity as a criterion for judging the possibility of infringement. Technological similarities can be measured by transforming patent documents into abstracted forms which contain specific technological key-findings and structural relationships among technological components in the invention. Although keyword-based technological similarity has been widely adopted for patent analysis related research, it is inadequate for identifying patent infringement because a keyword vector cannot reflect specific technological key-findings and structural relationships among technological components. As a remedy, this paper exploited a subject–action–object (SAO) based semantic technological similarity. An SAO structure explicitly describes the structural relationships among technological components in the patent, and the set of SAO structures is considered to be a detailed picture of the inventor’s expertise, which is the specific key-findings in the patent. Therefore, an SAO based semantic technological similarity can identify patent infringement. Semantic similarity between SAO structures is automatically measured using SAO based semantic similarity measurement method using WordNet, and the technological relationships among patents were mapped onto a 2-dimensional space using multidimensional scaling (MDS). Furthermore, a clustering algorithm is used to automatically suggest possible patent infringement cases, allowing large sets of patents to be handled with minimal effort by human experts. The proposed method will be verified by detecting real patent infringement in prostate cancer treatment technology, and we expect this method to relieve human experts’ work in identifying patent infringement.     

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.     

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.