The patent activities of Korea and Taiwan: a comparative case study of patent statistics

This paper examines the patent grant rate of Korea and Taiwan by using the country-level patent statistics of Korea, Taiwan and USA during the period of 1988–1998. The patent grant rate means the rate of US patent grants to the applications filed in USA during the investigated years. To measure the grant rate, a model was developed for the methodological procedure. In the framework of the model, the process of patent dynamics in these countries shows different patterns. The financial crisis of Korea in 1998–1999 influenced the number of domestic patent applications by Koreans, resulting in the rapid decrease. The US patent application rate by Koreans, however, was not affected, keeping the average rate of applications at 7.5% of the Korean applications during the investigated period. The rate of US patent grants by Koreans in the early 1990s dropped, which can be explained by the change of patent strategy of Samsung Elec. Co. Ltd.Taiwan, on the other hand, had filed 160% more US patent applications than its own domestic applications. The authors suggest that this is attributable to some US patent applications corresponding to Taiwanese domestic applications for utility models, and that this may be a factor in the lower rate of Taiwanese US patent grants (average 53.4%) than that of Koreans (average 66.3%). The rate of US patent grants by Taiwanese has constantly increased, while that for Koreans has fluctuated; the authors conjecture that this implies that Taiwanese patent management for the US patents has improved.     

Determinants of patent infringement awards in the US,Japan, and China: A comparative analysis

Patent litigations are essential measures to maximize returns from research and development. Although major countries have promoted pro-patent policies, there are significant differences in patent infringement awards among jurisdictions. This article comparatively analyzes determinants of patent infringement awards in the US, Japan, and China using 880 court decisions between 2000 and 2014. We find that Japan's judges attach more weight to a litigated patent's technological importance, whereas judges in the US and China prioritize its private economic value. Besides, damages ruled by US juries are almost unpredictable, while judges provide the most predictable decisions. We also find that the jury system can explain both the variation in the US patent infringement awards and the difference with awards in Japan, but the treble damage system can only explain the former. These results provide novel empirical evidence for public policy debates on patent protection and practical insights for intellectual property professionals.     

Twenty years of US nanopatenting: Maintenance renewal scoring as an indicator of patent value

This paper introduces a new measure of patent value – Maintenance Renewal Score (MRSc) – reflecting assignee valuing the patent by paying successive renewal fees. We generate MRSc's for nanotechnology patents issued by the US Patent Office from 1999 through 2009, with US assignees and US inventors. Patenting increases over this period, coincident with increased US funding of nanotechnology R&D. We compare maintenance rates over the period, and against a comparison set of all 1999 USPTO grants to US inventors/assignees. We find differences in propensity to maintain the nanopatents by institution type, technological sector, and patent complexity.     

Are patent trade wars impeding innovation and development?

When patents support anti-competitive conduct, innovation can be damaged not only by lack of market access but by the prohibitive costs of litigation. The creation of patent barriers is inconsistent with IP protection and enforcement agreed upon under the World Trade Organization and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (‘TRIPS’). The study uses the US Apple v HTC IP legal case to investigate anti-competitive market behavior and trade barriers. The research provides a formal patent analytic methodology and the case analysis result. The research method tests whether patent conflicts and technical trade barriers are significantly encouraged by existing IP laws.     

Measuring patent quality: A claim and search report approach

This paper presents a new prospective metric for assessing the novelty and inventiveness of patents. It does this by using initial patent search reports and examiner's intuition about the impact of adverse citations on patent claim survival. The paper then demonstrates the metric by evaluating the quality of Switzerland's national patent stock using a selection model, finding that between 84 and 90% of the country's national patents would likely not survive examination at the European Patent Office. In doing so, it contributes to the larger literature on patent assessment, underscores the relevance of patent strategy in the observed characteristics of patents, and removes some of the ambiguity in the academic literature about backward citations.     

The prevalence of weak patents in the United States: A new method to identify weak patents and the implications for patent policy

The presence of patents with dubious validity (i.e., weak patents) has been one of the prominent patent policy issues with undesirable consequences in innovation. The present study empirically examines the prevalence of weak patents in the United States and whether or not the current patent system is capable of correcting weak patent issues. To this end, we propose a new method to identify weak patents by using patent citation information in conjunction with the textual similarity between citing and cited patents. Our method, along with a series of internal validation measures, shows that 13% of U.S. patents filed from 2001 to 2010 are weak patents. By applying this new method, we find that patent owners build a patent portfolio around a weak patent by developing subsequent inventions more than they do for a non-weak patent. Our further analysis finds that a weak patent is more or equally likely to be retained by the patent owner than a non-weak patent. Our findings suggest that patent owners have an incentive to invest in maintaining and appropriating weak patents, and thus, the current patent system is incapable of self-correcting weak patent issues.     

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.     

Legal Validity Metrics for Patent Offices and Law Firms – Recycling of Patent Court Appeal Decisions for Quality Management

In all relevant patent systems an adversely affected party has the possibility to appeal the patent office's decision in front of a patent court or Board of Appeal (BoA). Within a European context, the EPO is, in a way, even engaging in de facto competition with national patent offices. As an example, the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) provides quasi identical patent products and offers the same kind of legal recourse to the German patent court (BPatGer) for these products. Both offices offer an opposition procedure which is open for appeal, and also in the case of a refusal, both offices offer the possibility of appeals. Thus, the EPO Boards of Appeal are engaged in making decisions every year on around 2000 cases and, e.g., the BPatGer on 600 cases regarding the legal validity of the first instance's work. It is thus remarkable that, so far, nobody has systematically included the work of the patent courts in a statistical legal validity evaluation in the context of the Patent & Trademark Offices' (PTOs') quality assurance systems.Since there is obviously a need to establish a common standard for the comparison of first and second instance legal teachings in patent law, a methodology for comparative legal validity analysis is proposed in this paper. I have tested and optimised the approach while working as a project manager at the European Patent Office, based on analysis of 2300 appeal decisions from seven annual batches.     

The future of patent information

This article forms part of the debate on how the provision and use of patent information is, and will continue to be, influenced by the rapidly increasing capabilities of the Internet and related information technology, together with a number of major changes in patent law around the world. Topics explored include the relationship between the low cost, limited value-added Internet services and the traditional higher cost, significantly value-added commercial database providers, the effects of the impending publication of many US applications, and the opportunities opening up as good-quality machine-generated translations are becoming more easily available. Other topics discussed include the implications of the anticipated implementation of the Community Patent Convention, the community utility model, WIPO's activities, the potential dangers of official patent office data being provided only on the Internet, and the problems of the multiple formats for data on the Internet and on CD-ROMs. The author emphasises these are personal views from his extensive experience in a major patent library.     

Foreign applications at the Japan Patent Office - An empirical analysis of selected growth factors

This article aims to evaluate some of the possible factors which could have had a significant role in the increase in the yearly number of foreign patent applications at the Japan Patent Office. The analysed period ranges from 1991 to 2005. In the years considered, foreign applications increased constantly while the number of domestic filings remained almost the same or even decreased. The increase is more striking when compared to analogous figures of the US Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office, where the corresponding ratio did not change too much in the same period. Building on previous literature, this paper analyses the impact of some macroeconomic and structural characteristics of the extending countries, on one side, and, on the other side, some features specific to the receiving country and its Patent Office (here Japan and the JPO). This work tries to capture the relevance of such drivers in the increased amount of foreign patent applications at the JPO.     

Deep learning based pipeline with multichannel inputs for patent classification

This work introduces a deep learning pipeline for automatic patent classification with multichannel inputs based on LSTM and word vector embeddings. Sophisticated text mining methods are used to extract the most important segments from patent texts, and a domain-specific pre-trained word embeddings model for the patent domain is developed; it was trained on a very large dataset of more than five million patents. The deep learning pipeline is using multiple parallel LSTM networks that read the source patent document using different input dimensions namely embeddings of different segments of patent texts, and sparse linear input of different metadata. Classifying patents into corresponding technical fields is selected as a use case. In this use case, a series of patent classification experiments are conducted on different patent datasets, and the experimental results indicate that using the segments of patent texts as well as the metadata as multichannel inputs for a deep neural network model, achieves better performance than one input channel.     

The persistence of worthless patents?

The U.S. patent system requires owners to pay renewal fees at the four, eight, and twelve-year points of the patent's life of twenty years. Previous studies of renewal rates for patents granted over 1981–1991 and 2001–2004 show only around half of the patents were renewed by the twelfth year—leading some scholars to refer to this majority of patents as ‘worthless’. Much has changed in the world since patent renewal fees began in 1981, however. This paper investigates whether patent renewal rates changed correspondingly. Among those changes, the sheer volume of patents increased substantially, creating a challenge for collating patent data. A web scraper was coded to collect renewal rate data on 2.5 million utility patents issued from 1992 to 2009—the most recent patents for which twelve-year renewal rates are available. We find, somewhat surprisingly, that patent renewal rates are virtually unchanged from several years ago. We present and discuss related data, and present the underlying computer code that patent researchers may find useful for investigating a wide range of topics in the future.     

Blockchain patent landscaping: An expert based methodology and search query

The present study is concerned with the emergence of Blockchain related technologies in terms of patenting activity. Blockchain has captured the attention of the public and research has intensified in this field over the last few years, making it a highly interesting topic of study for a patent analysis in order to obtain insight into the developments of this emerging technology. In this paper we present a unique methodology and exhaustive search strategy for identifying Blockchain patent documents by using a combination of specific keywords and patent classifications. This query was built in cooperation with subject matter experts of the European Patent Office (EPO). Our keyword set was then analysed by relevance and was prioritised. The set of specific relevant patent classifications was furthermore combined with keywords in order to exclude false positives. With our methodology we present an exhaustive query for retrieving a highly relevant dataset of Blockchain related patents, extracted from the EPO databases that can be used for patent landscaping exercises or any other bibliometric analysis. In a case study we applied the search strategy to analyse worldwide Blockchain patenting from 2008 till 2018. The results are presented in this paper.     

A proposed framework for the certification of the patent information professional

Gone are the days of exclusive access to esoteric patent information databases or rummaging through a classification box of patent publications in order to identify prior art. Patent information is now widely and freely available to all. Although the availability of patent information will likely facilitate future innovation, the access is resulting in a wide range of skills and competencies among those who search and interpret patent information. The time has come to standardise these skills and to devise a certification scheme so that the art of patent searching and analysis is entrenched as a profession for many years to come. This article reviews the progress towards such a scheme, and explains the current PIUG proposal, a key element of which is a three tiered examination structure.     

Patenting trends in biometric technology of the Big Five patent offices

We examined the overall trends in biometric technology based on patent documents. Using PATSTAT database, we extracted 37,462 patent documents applied at the Big Five patent offices between 1990 and 2016. Latent Dirichlet allocation was applied to their abstracts to observe annual trends by topic. Our results are as follows: Fingerprint-enabled car anti-theft systems have been undergoing rapid technological development since 2014. In response, biometric signal transmitting models are becoming popular owing to concerns about theft of biometric templates. While fingerprint, face, and iris authentication technologies continue to advance, finger vein, voice, and signature authentication technologies are lagging. Use of biometric technologies in financial transactions, server networks, and digital media content security are decreasing as well. A citation analysis discovered key topics and patent applicants: Surprisingly, the quantitative growth rate of topics and the effect on the knowledge network showed an inverse relationship. US firms had the most citations, but fewer backward citations of own work, unlike Japanese companies. We provide practical insights to stakeholders of biometric technology.     

Academic response to the European Commission’s Questionnaire on the patent system in Europe: An economic approach

This paper presents an economic opinion on the questionnaire on the European patent system that was recently issued by the European Commission. We argue that the debate on patent reform in Europe needs to be more focused on its economic purpose, namely the promotion of innovation. As a first step we unfold sub-issues and trade-offs underlying the general and consensual goal which “promoting innovation” is. We contrast the protection and diffusion functions of the patent system, both of which must be taken into account in order to create an original European patent regime geared towards innovation. We also emphasize the possibility for the European patent system to answer more specific needs, such as those of small and medium enterprises or those of industries with highly cumulative innovations. We discuss as the second step the capacity of the European patent system to achieve these policy goals through various levers. We especially argue that patent fees or translation requirements should be viewed as policy instruments rather than as in a purely budgetary perspective. We moreover consider the positive or negative consequences one can expect from the coexistence of different patent systems in Europe.     

Examining the trajectory of a standard for patent classification: An institutional account of a technical cooperation between EPO and USPTO

This paper explores the dynamics of standardization practices associated with patent classification and discusses the technical, legal and policy implications of standard-setting for patent classification. Therefore, this paper aims to fill a gap in the literature on knowledge management, based on an analysis of the development and implementation of Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC). This paper examines the processes of developing a standard for classifying patent applications from the perspective of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Our findings reveal that standardization in the context of patent classification is primarily shaped by the interaction involving patent offices that belong to the IP5 group. Furthermore, we found evidence that the CPC standard can be regarded as a response to the demands posed by innovative firms requiring accurate patent classification to provide secure protection for their new technologies.     

Patents from Latin America and Spain with Latipat: Country coverage and ability to search for emerging topics like nanotechnology

The Latipat project unifies patent information from 20 Ibero-American countries making this content available and free of cost via several major public patent search systems: namely Espacenet, Patentscope and Invenes. These different accesses are presented and their data coverage is analysed. A comparison showed that, although the patent information comes from the same origin, the country coverage and actuality of the patent information varies substantially in the three compared search systems. Regarding the technology coverage, an exemplary search for nanotechnology patents revealed different results depending on the keyword and classification support of each search system.     

Antitrust environment and innovation

Summary This paper examines the relationship between the antitrust environment and innovation in the US economy, where innovation is measured by patent activity. The hypothesis to be tested is whether antitrust enforcement activity, as measured by the number of civil filings of the US Department of Justice, has had a significant impact on the level of innovation in the US economy, after adjusting for other factors that have an impact on innovation, such as research and development expenditures and real economic growth. Impacts of civil antitrust case filings, criminal antitrust case filings and total US Department of Justice antitrust case filings on patent activity in the USA are estimated for the period 1953-2000. The empirical results show that civil case filings have a statistically significant impact on innovation.