Digest XIII - November 2017

Although we are reporting on November news, this is the last edition which will be published this year, so I’d like to start by wishing you all the best for the Festive Season and for the New Year.   The blog tracks 75 organisations all of who are active in providing software , and / or services in the information industry and IP world, highlights from the commercial sector were enhancements to Patbase Analytics and I2E, and in the governmental sector a publication commemorating 10 years of the IP5. This month we also report on some IP office events on trademarks and designs. Did you realise that a ds9 newstracker can be set up to follow the published activities of any organisation in any industry?   More on this in 2018.

 

Patent information news from the IP5 offices and WIPO
The blog follows the IP5 offices – EPO, SIPO, KIPO, JPO, USPTO and WIPO and reports primarily on their information related news, and events, starting with meetings and announcements from multiple offices and finishing up with single office events and changes in information products.
So starting with the IP5 who published their annual statistics report this month which indicated that patent applications grew by 10% in 2016 at their offices, meaning they published between them more than 2.6 million patent applications.  This year the IP5 celebrated 10 years of cooperation, a cooperation which has notably resulted in two patent information portals of great use to patent searchers as well as to patent examiners - the Global Dossier and the Common Citation Document (CCD).  
EPO and SIPO officially renewed their 30 year-long cooperative relationship by signing a comprehensive, unlimited by time, strategic partnership agreement. No surprise that technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and green technologies were included in the collaborative efforts. It was also reported that China is now the 6th largest country of origin for applicants for EPO patents. A strong indication of the usage of IP by Chinese companies to protect their own goods overseas.
The EPO and the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) held a conference in November in Brussels to learn from industry and provide an update on biotechnology patenting in Europe as the two organisations work more closely together to provide more certainty for plant variety innovators in Europe wanting to protect their IP in the most appropriate manner. At the moment only 1 in 3 biotechnology patent applications becomes a granted patent at the EPO.

 

JPO Deputy Commissioner attended the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) Sixteenth session of the council of Ministers in November. The JPO cooperates with ARIPO through WIPO to support the development of industrial property systems in African countries.
KIPO and WIPO held ‘Appropriate Technology’ Competitions in four countries including El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Panama, and Costa Rica. Appropriate Technology (AT) refers to technology that is developed to suit the environment, cultural, social and economic conditions of a region. The competition encourages the use of technologies described in expired patents to develop low cost solutions. So far products developed have included sugar cane charcoal manufacturing process , bamboo housing, a cooking stove, and herbal oil extractor. China held its 11th ‘China Patent Week’ where IP creation, IP commercialisation and fostering an environment where IP is protected in China are promoted.

 

IP Offices Trademarks, Designs, Copyright and Cyber News
Executives from the JPO and the USTPO agreed to work in cooperation to create a JP-US common design classification system which should lead to smother industrial designs protections for companies in both countries wishing to protect in the other one. This initiative stems from the ID5 cooperation – analogous to the IP5 for patents, but for industrial designs.   The ID5 met in December, and we will publish information related learnings from that event next time. WIPO hosted the 38th SCM (Standing Committee on the Law of Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications) on Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications law. The meeting considered GUIs and typeface / font based industrial designs, how to prevent country names being used as trademarks, and the issue of trademark domain name registrations was discussed. SIPO has published a concordance between the International Design Classification scheme and its National Economy Industries Classification. This will facilitate the mapping between design patents and China’s industries, allowing statisticians and policy makers to review the usage of design IP in different sectors. The USPTO is looking at ways to remove unused but registered trademarks from the Trademark Register with a simple procedure. Sometimes this would just be to cancel a mark from certain classes. These are some of the options under consideration at the USPTO Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB).   The Swiss Federal Council is planning a strong approach to protecting creative artist’s work online, without criminalising end-users. The first court dedicated to handling e-commerce and internet related cases opened in Hangzhou China, appropriately all processing by the court is handled electronically. ‘Cyber’ cases rose from 600 in 2013 to over 10,000 in 2016. Finally A Study conducted by WIPO presented the first-ever figures on value of “Intangible Capital” in manufactured goods. The results of the study revealed that almost one third of the value of manufactured products sold around the world comes from “Intangible Capital,” meaning branding, design and technologies.

 

Patent information and patent databases
Minesoft launched an enhanced Legal Status Viewer for PatBase this month. The Legal Status viewer integrates data from the European, American and Japanese National Patent Offices, as well as other legal status data into PatBase.   Minesoft present several options to view the legal status results for a family including timeline and table views, and there is a priority relationship diagram.   Patbase can also show calculated expiry dates which actually do provide for SPC, and Patent Term Extensions where these exist.

 

IP Analytics
PatBase Analytics v2.0 is now live offering analytics on up to 250,000 records with the availability of 3-dimensional views, and more customizable graphics. Charts and data can be shared and annotated using a “note” function. Users searches can be filtered to focus the analysis on specific assignees, jurisdictions, date ranges and patent types. Users can also take advantage of, Basic Analysis and Standard Analysis.   IFI Claims launched its ‘Data Enrichment Dataset’ to coincide with the launch of Google Public Patent Datasets.   The IFI data is subscription only, it facilitates accurate company name searching of the patent data.

 

Scientific and medical databases
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) released the 2018 version of MeSH this month. MeSH 2018 is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus used to index articles for the Medline / PubMed databases, available direct from the NLM and also available on hosts such as ProQuest, EBSCO and STN where additional functionality, content and efficient multi database searching is possible. For 2018 there will be 474 new descriptors (471 terms and 3 new publication types.), 106 replacement updated terms and 7 descriptors deleted. The three new publication types are ‘Adaptive clinical trial’, Equivalence clinical trial’ and Expression of Concern (this is to do with article integrity – not clinical trials).

 

Text mining / text analytics/ NLP
A recently published report by Tractica on AI technologies their potential markets, current value estimated at $ 644 million and potential usages.   Of the top ten markets, those relevant for the search / information field are 1) - Visual recognition, classification and tagging. Much has been achieved in facial recognition for photos.   Could this one day be re-purposed for patent drawings, and trademark images recognition and retrieval? 2) to improve text mining of unstructured documents, examples given are medical records, but such technology could be utilised for retrieval of patent descriptions and claims.   Similarity and semantic search tools are already available, but currently these leave much to be desired. 3) Using AI technology such as Datacap, which can ‘learn’ key parameters and speed up the digitization of paper-based collections. Linguamatics released I2E 5.2.0, the new interface with access to many more ‘items’ and with Connected Data Technology enabling locally stored data and cloud-based data to be combined together, indexes and queries can be seen in a single tree view, are faster to run, and the results screen makes it easier to identify hits. Lexis Advance was enhanced with data relating to US Department of Defense Boards for the Correction of Military Records. The data related to 127,000 decisions and changes to service records and discharge status, which are important for veterans when they leave the military.

 

Past Events London Info International
This year the meeting was held at the London Design Centre, a much more convenient and convivial location. Companies exhibiting and talking at the conference were a mix of large publishers, and young technology companies, and some individual academic journal publishers. Noteworthy newcomers were 1 science ( indexing and searchability to a very large collection of scientific and technical publications,) , deepsearch9 (web tracking, indexing, search and analytics for any content collection) , NexGen (healthcare communities builder introduced its new repository for discovery of posters from medical conferences), and Scibite, all are bringing something new to the information scene.