Programme

  09.00 - 10.30 hrs 

Workshop session 1 (1 hr 30 mins)
A. What are the best ways to retrieve data on the fate of EP patents after grant?
B. Chinese patent information: what do searchers need?
C. From ancient traditional knowledge to the internet: is non-patent literature the new challenge in searching?

Tutorials (40 mins)
I. How does the EPO know when to stop a search?
II. Patent statistics and patent mapping 

09.15 - 10.15 hrs

10.45 - 12.15 hrs

Workshops session 2
D. How is Web 2.0 influencing patent searching?
E. Are users' expectations being met with IPC revision

10.45 - 11.25 hrs


11.35 - 12.15 hrs

III. OPS in action
IV. Getting the most from ESPACE EP - tips for setting up regular searches and optimising results.
V.  Tips & tricks for searching East Asian databases
VI. Using the alert service for the European Patent Register

15.30 - 17.30 hrs 

Official opening

Hosted by master of ceremonies, Andrew Hammond, European Patent Attorney

Welcome by Maud Olofsson, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Enterprise and Energy
Welcome by Alison Brimelow, President of the EPO                                                 Welcome by Susanne Ås Sivborg, Director General of the Swedish Patent Office  

Keynote speech

High Quality of the Patent Database provides certainty to European companies such as Ericsson.                        
John Han, Vice-President, Patent Development, Ericsson AB

Ericsson believes that the evaluation and prosecution of patent applications is a co-operative process. Everybody's interests are best served by the existence of comprehensive patent data providing an accurate reflection of prior art. Advantages of this include making proper priority filing decisions, more accurate and reasonable claim rejections and corresponding claim amendments during the prosecution phase, more informed business decisions when making foreign filing decisions and making the overall filing "game plan", and providing all parties, including potential licensees and users of such patented technologies, with a better idea of the scope and clarity of issued claims and their patented technologies. 

Breaking the language barrier

How good are machine-translation techniques for patent searching?
Barrou Diallo, EPO

Machine translation has been developing rapidly in recent years; the EPO has been working on the use of machine-translation systems for more than 6 years, offering pioneering advances to its end-users. This presentation will look at recent developments in the field. It will highlight where the EPO's experience has shown that machine-translation is considered a useful tool for IP professionals, where particular difficulties lie and where the focus will be on future development work. It will also provide an update on the particular issue of translations of Chinese patent documentation and position current industrial developments in the context of scientific research studies.

Life after the London Agreement: what happens to European patents after grant?
Marjolaine Thulin, Awapatent

The EPC 2000 and the London Agreement have added new elements to the already somewhat complex life of an EPO granted patent. This presentation gives an overview of what happens to European patents after grant, followed by a review of the available sources of information on the fate of granted patents. This will be illustrated by examples of search results. A wish list concerning the legal status information on European patents after grant will also be presented for possible actions by the EPO and the patent offices of EPO member states.   

Focus on quality in patent information - part 1

What makes a high-quality patent application for the patent searcher?
Bettina de Jong, Shell

Patent quality is often defined by the degree of compliance with legislation and the level of assurance about the validity of granted patents. From a searcher's point of view, however, quality is an indication of how easy it is to retrieve and select patent publications. Patent offices aim for higher quality applications through better access to data, but what is the quality of this data? 

Down the quality street - does the quality of patent information really matter to the EPO ?
Jeremy Scott, EPO

Given that applicants draft applications (seems logical), the scope for EPO examiners to improve the patent information quality from them is strictly limited. Moreover, given the power of the internal tools available to examiners, does the EPO really care about patent information quality provided externally. What steps can it take to ensure that the best quality data streams into the public arena ? Certainly search quality at the EPO has always been premium, but how does the EPO monitor and assure the quality of search reports?

From the EPO to a commercial service - can commercial providers add quality as well as value?
Call for papers

Fit for purpose - when is a search, or a searcher good enough?
Aalt van de Kuilen, Solvay Pharmaceuticals , B.V.

Although the use of patent information has increased over the last years, many people have serious doubts about the improvement of the quality of the searches and the searchers. This indicates already the two main variables in patent searching: the tools that are used and the competences of the searcher. These factors are related to the knowledge of the searcher and to personal behaviour. Training and certification of the searchers can improve the standard of patent searching.  

Quality assurance in the EPO Patent Information Resource master databases
Miguel Albrecht, EPO

The EPO maintains a high quality database for prior-art searches. Before data is loaded onto the database, it is standardised, validated and, in many cases corrected. Between 2004 and 2007, the EPO performed 4.2 million quality improvements on 15.6 million newly added documents. In the same period, over 1.2 million manual corrections were made to the 22 million newly added citations and an equivalent number of corrections were performed through rules in software. A direct benefit of these corrections is that users have less documents to sift through in their searches. This presentation discusses the challenges of dealing with the growing volume of patents and complexity of data while maintaining a high quality standard.

Martin Müller, an examiner at the EPO, will summarise the recent EPO case law - which raises questions over the effectiveness of the internet as a source of prior art - and related developments. 

John Gray, a European Patent Attorney with Murgitroyd & Company, will review the situations in which internet sources can be useful to applicants and opponents, and when the burden of proof may be a critical issue.