Digest VIII - May 2017

This issue brings news on cooperations and other initiatives from the IP5 patent offices, (China, EPO, Japan, Korea, USA), WIPO and an update on some recent meetings I’ve attended, and a look forward to the forthcoming CIIPM event in July.  It is always interesting to review the activities of the IP offices who are always planning ahead for future technology growth areas. Don’t forget that the events section of my website presents an overview of events, conferences and exhibitions in the commercial information space, including IP, information retrieval and other events of interest to our community. The next issue will focus on information industry commercial news. This is only the second issue for 2017, not least because your author has been quite busy this year!   I am now planning to resume more frequent publication of the Info blog. News for the Info Blog is primarily created using tracking software from deep Search 9, but please do also feel free to send me specific items in which you think I may be interested.

News from the IP5 offices

Cooperations are continuing amongst the major offices, as they work to align procedures, and make the most of opportunities to share work, leading to improved patent prosecution timeliness and towards more similar decisions. They are also enabling sharing of best practice amongst the smaller offices. My selected highlights are below.

Asian office news

The Japan Patent Office (JPO) released the 16th edition of its manual for Trial and Appeal Proceedings. Fees were last updated in April 2016. The manual covers application phase for Patents, Utility Models, Designs, and Trademarks, requests for examination, registration, post-registration, opposition, appeal, trial fees and processes. Underlining the growing importance in understanding the interaction of patents with standards, the JPO is cooperating with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), to make available to its patent examiners information relating to standards for their prior art searching which underpins quality of the patenting process. The initiative is led by the JPO’s Examination Planning Office, Administrative Affairs Division, Patent and Design Examination Department (Physics, Optics, Social Infrastructure and Design), JPO. It builds on an earlier cooperation between JPO and ISO. (International Standards Organisation).

In April, KIPO and WIPO held the ‘Heads of IP Offices Conference’ (HIPOC) bringing together representatives of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. According to the press release the event was led by WIPO’s Mario Matus, with the aim of “increasing the IP capacity of developing countries”.

In March, KIPO (Korean IP Office) opened the Ylang Ylang Herb Oil Center in the Philippines. This new centre builds on existing initiatives between the two countries, and forms part of KIPO’s ‘Intellectual Property sharing project’.. There are three threads within the project – AT (Appropriate Technology) dissemination , Branding support project, and Korea Funds in Trust at WIPO through which KIPO aims to assist developing countries make the most of IP for their economic growth. The AT project focusses on creation of technologies for local use, and KIPO officials can carry out prior art searches and assist with patentability matters.

European Patent Office (EPO) news
The 2016 annual report reveals that 96 000 patents were granted. This represents a massive 40% increase over 2015. And in April the EPO and the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO) launched a Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) pilot programme. Cooperation agreements with the Institute of Industrial Property of Angola and the National Institute of Industrial Property of Argentina (INPI) were signed in May. These co-operations will revolve around search, examination and automation, and the use and exchange of patent data and databases. The EPO has launched an academic research programme, and the deadline for grant applications for this is 15th June 2017.   The programme, set to be annual, has six themes, covering the fields of economics, IP management, IP law and data sciences. Examples provided are: The European patent system's impact on trade and investment in Europe, Patent services and intermediaries in Europe, IP business models and patent valuation methods, Patents for SMEs and universities in Europe, Patents and climate change mitigation technologies, Advanced use of PATSTAT and patent analytics.

WIPO news
The Australian Government made a donation in March to a Voluntary Fund which was set up in 2004 to enable participation of the world’s indigenous peoples in the WIPO run Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC). The fund had run out of cash in 2014. The PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) continues to grow with 233,000 applications in 2016, a 7.3% increase in 2016 compared to 2015. Madrid system trademark applications saw a similar % growth, and industrial design (Hague convention) applications grew by 13.9%, underpinning the importance of designs as an IP asset for global businesses.   Four of the top five applicants in 2016 were from Asia underlining the increasing global vision of Asian companies. WIPO also released press release and video footage from their 2016 conference on cybersquatting and domain names. Domain names cases (particularly surrounding the new ‘gTLDs’) increased in 2016. ‘gTLDs’ are the new generic Top Level Domain Names such as .SHOP, .GAMES, of which 1,200 new ones have been released.

User Meetings
This year I have already attended a couple of user meetings, one here in Cambridge, UK in April hosted by Linguamatics, as a ‘Text Mining Conference’ which anyone with an interest in text analytics can attend. This year about 80 people attended and six Linguamatics partner companies also presented. Linguamatics continue to build their I2E platform, and we were able to preview a new user interface, and attend workshops. Not much to report on the patent information side, but interesting case studies in clinical and other healthcare information and chemical competitive intelligence were presented. Next I headed to Bonn, for a while the capital of Germany, for the PatentSight user meeting. In contrast to I2E, PatentSight’s Patent Asset Index provides statistical patent analytics based on meta tags such as citations, classifications, and other calculated metrics to evaluate individual patents and patent portfolios.   PatentSight now have a scientific advisory board, and a growing customer base.   We heard from industry customers about the importance of building portfolio benchmarking in to their IP management and strategic functions, and how they use the patent asset index derived views to enable conversations with management who tend to need to see the bigger patent information picture in order to take company-wide decisions.

Forthcoming events
The conference season is almost over, but here in Cambridge Stuart and I are working hard putting together the 2nd Cambridge Information and Intellectual Property meeting (#CIIPM2). This year’s meeting takes place on Wednesday 5th July, at the same venue – Homerton College Conference Centre. We have a full programme of expert talks ranging from strategies to gain patent protection in Europe, managing R&D tax credits, the importance of trade secrets and best practice in managing IP, as well as a look at competitive intelligence with patents. Artificial Intelligence to handle repetitive data tasks is a growing field, and our opening speaker Emily Foges from Luminance will be thought provoking on this topic I am sure. Luminance are also a Cambridge start up company. This year we have a slightly larger exhibition, which I am sure will also prove very useful for attendees , particularly for those looking to find out about the latest software for patent search and analysis, obtaining translations of Asian patents and other literature, and for those who want to know more about protecting their inventions using IP, the UK IPO will also be present.