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.     

Occupational exposure of medical radiation workers in Lithuania, 1950-2003

This study presents the summary of historical exposures, measurementpractice and evolution of the recording of the individual dosesof medical radiation workers during 1950–2003 in Lithuania.The aim of this study is to present occupational exposure ofmedical radiation workers in Lithuania since the earliest appearanceperiod. Data from publications have been used for the earliesttwo periods prior to 1969; data from the archives of the largesthospitals, for the period 1970–1990 and data from LithuanianSubdivision of Individual Dosimetry of Radiation ProtectionCenter, for the period 1991–2003. The analysis of thedata obtained from personal records allows to conclude thatthe average annual effective dose of Lithuanian medical radiationworkers was greatly reduced in radiology, radiotherapy and nuclearmedicine in all occupational categories from 1950 to 2003. Duringthe last period 1991–2003 extremity doses clearly decreasedand after 1994 were no longer present in Lithuania.     

The X-Patents

The first American patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) were designed as X-Patents. About ten thousand were issued, from July 1790 to July 1836, by almost 7000 inventors, following the Patent Acts of 1790 and 1793. Patents had come of age. Unfortunately, most documents (around 75%), that were just named and dated, were burned in a fire, which occurred on December 15, 1836. Such documents received this specific identification (X-Patent) because they were retrospectively renumbered. We applied new procedures such as data mining to arrive at new correlations and results. For example, it was possible to find first, middle and last names of inventors, assignees, witnesses and manufacturers in most patents. The objective is to describe the earliest United States patents and present some landmarks that cover almost half a century and constitute the dawn of innovation and the rise of the Industrial Revolution in America.     

The rules concerning translations in the European patent grant procedure

This is a synopsis of the provisions of the European Patent Convention (EPC) and national law of the Contracting States regarding the stipulation of written translations in the European patent grant procedure. A distinction is drawn between translations which have to be filed with the European Patent Office itself and those which may be required at certain stages of procedure by the national patent authorities of Contracting States to the EPC.     

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.     

The more you spend, the more you get? The effects of R&D and capital expenditures on the patenting activities of biotechnology firms

This paper provides evidence on the mechanisms influencing the patent output of a sample of small and large, entrepreneurial and established biotechnology firms from the input of indirect knowledge acquired from capital expenditures and direct knowledge from in-house R&D. Statistical models of counts are used to analyse the relationship between patent applications and R&D investment and capital expenditures. It focuses on biotechnology in the period 2002–2007 and is based on a unique data set drawn from various sources including the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, the European Patent Office (EPO), the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. The statistical models employed in the paper are Poisson distribution generalisations with the actual distribution of patent counts fitting the negative binomial distribution and gamma distribution very well. Findings support the idea that capital expenditures—taken as equivalent to technical change embodied in new machinery and capital equipment—may also play a crucial role in the development of new patentable items from scientific companies. For EPO patents, this role appears even more important than that played by R&D investment. The overall picture emerging from our analysis of the determinants of patenting in biotechnology is that the innovation process involves a well balanced combination of inputs from both R&D and new machinery and capital equipment.     

The international patent classification

On January 1, 1980, the third edition of the International Patent Classifivation (IPC) published on July 1, 1979, entered into force. This means that on that date, almost 50 Industrial Property Offices throughout the world started applying the symbols of the third edition of the IPC, identified by “Int. Cl.³.” on their published patent documents and in their official Gazettes. The article underlines the importance of this event and gives detailed information about the IPC and its application.     

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.     

EPC 2000 – State of play nearly two years on

The European Patent Convention as revised in 2000 (EPC 2000) [1] entered into force on 13 December 2007. While the revision changed rather little in terms of substantive patent law, it did change procedural practice compared to the EPC in force before, drafted in 1973. This article looks at some key features of the European patent grant and post-grant procedures that either have changed fundamentally or have been newly introduced, and their effect on patent document collections.     

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.     

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.     

Patent information services in India with special reference to drugs and pharmaceuticals

Patent information is useful to a wide spectrum of users. Chemical patent information is particularly useful to those concerned with innovations in this area, as the chemical patent literature is almost of the same size as the chemical journal literature. National and International patent laws and treaties greatly influence the size of patent literature, its dissemination and exploitation for economic development. Paris Convention, WIPO and PCT programmes have all played an important role in the field of patent information. In India, patent information has a very significant role to play because the country's present law offers wide-ranging opportunities from adaptive development on a foreign patent to its commercialization. Patent information services in India are provided by several organisations which include the Patent Office Headquarters at Calcutta and its branches at New Delhi, Bombay and Madras; Patent Information System, Nagpur; National Informatics Centre, New Delhi; Patent Unit, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi; Technical Information Cell, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, Hyderabad; National Chemical Laboratory, Pune and National Information Centre for Drugs and Pharmaceuticals, Lucknow. Many of these organisations cover all areas of technology whereas others are restricted to particular disciplines. National Information Centre for Drugs and Pharmaceuticals is one such specialised centre restricted to only drugs and pharmaceutical. Its services such as patent bulletin and patent searches on selected drugs have been well accepted by the users. The Centre's holdings of foreign patent literature are meagre and need to be strengthened by acquiring them mainly from the U.S.A., France, F.R.G., Japan, Italy and Switzerland which are the top six nations responsible for introducing new drug substances. With a computer now installed at the Centre, the Centre should acquire INPADOC database and collaborate with existing Patent Information System, Nagpur and National Informatics Centre, New Delhi for better services. A survey of the patent information services in the countries of Asia and the Pacific carried out by the International Bureau of WIPO has put India in the first category because here information services are rendered by both the Industrial property organisation and other outside agencies.     

Current status of internal dosimetry in Lithuania

After Lithuania regained independence, the legal basis for existing radiation protection was modified radically according to the IAEA, ICRP recommendations and the requirements of legislation of the European Community. The legal basis for internal dosimetry and a functioning system of assessment of exposure to intake of radionuclides have been created in the Radiation Protection Centre (regulatory authority in radiation protection). Direct and indirect measurements of concentrations of radionuclides are used for the assessment of internal doses of workers and the public.     

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.     

WIPO state-of-the-art search program for developing countries

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has organized, since September 1975, for the benefit of developing countries, a free-of-charge state-of-the-art search program based upon the use of patent documents as a vehicle for the transfer of technology. The many varied features of patent documents are discussed together with the various types of searches possible. WIPO's search program started following an agreement of cooperation with the Austrian Government and has recently been augmented by agreements with Germany (Federal Republic of), Soviet Union, Sweden, Switzerland and the European Patent Office. Up to the end of June 1980, 839 requests for searches had been received, of which 637 had been finalized. The number of requests is steadily growing — illustrating the positive reaction to the program.     

International patent classification from the viewpoint of Japanese users

To clarify the rules for IPC classification the Japanese Patent Office has issued a Working Standard for assigning IPCs to Patents the contents of which are briefly described in the article.In some selected groups the Japanese Patent Office uses a subdivision of the IPC so called ‘Developing Marks’ — in others a special classification is done parallel to and based on another viewpoint than the IPC — so called ‘Facet Classification Marks’. Finally some proposals of Japan for the Int. Cl.⁴ are mentioned.     

Innovative Output,Productivity and Profitability. A Test Comparing USPTO and EPO Data

The aim of this paper is to test whether patent‐based indicators are still reliable measures of innovativeness in light of organizational changes in the field of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and the regulatory reforms already occurred and under way, respectively, at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). For most high‐tech industries, patents represent an outcome of the production process and their number can be taken as a proxy for a firm's ability to improve its productivity growth and profitability. The case study reported here concerns the biotechnology industry in Italy, whose firms, by definition, have Intellectual Property (IP) activities in their portfolios. For this purpose, we use a unique dataset which collects balance sheet items and patent information from EPO and USPTO. After linking firms' financial and production data with the patent information, we estimate a modified knowledge production function in which the dependent variable is alternatively (labor) productivity growth and profitability. Although based on a quite small sample, our findings provide some indication of a statistically significant relationship between patents with the EPO and both productivity growth and, in particular, profitability. This suggests that firms might pursue different strategies when patenting with the USPTO and the EPO.     

The European patent office ‘Raising the Bar’ initiative

On April 1, 2010 a number of Rule changes to the European Patent Convention entered into force. At the same time, revised Guidelines for Examination were published to take account of these changes and to update the sections relating to inventive step. All these changes were introduced under the banner of "Raising the Bar". They can be divided into three categories - inventive step, procedural changes, and the filing requirements for divisional applications. This article aims to explain what the changes are and the reasons for them.     

Modernization of the Danish Patent Office

The article describes the problems which built up in the Danish Patent Office from 1977 to 1983, when it was thought that the government would ratify the European Patent Convention, and the steps taken since then to modernize the Office and deal with the staff problems and the backlogs which had built up when it became clear that ratification would not be achieved. The backlog of 40 000 pending patent applications was trimmed by over 7000 applications in which there was now no interest, extra staff engaged, outside training assistance sought, and a large computerisation program initiated. Efficiency of the technical staff resources is enhanced by postponing the examination of priority claiming applications until information of the progress of these applications to grant in one of a number of specified countries is obtained from the INPADOC PFS and PRS databases. The modernization of the Office, which is directed towards its internal structures and procedures, has for its purpose the improvement not only of services to applicants for industrial property rights, but also of services to users of patent information.     

Prolific inventors—A bibliometric analysis

Patent information on 7392 inventors who received 9 or more U.S. Patents during 1975–84 was obtained. Analysis of the frequency distribution of patents per inventor reveals an approximately logarithmic decline from 9 to approximately 45 patents per inventor. The rate of decline decreases significantly for patent output above 45 patents per inventor. Patent citation analysis on 45 randomly selected inventors was performed. This sample included inventors who received from 9 to over 100 patents. The group received 1.79 citations per patent, 56.8% of the patents received at least 1 citation, and 2.7% of the patents received 10 or more citations. No statistically significant differences for these averages was found across the range of inventor patent output. No significant decline of patent quality with increased yearly patent output was observed.