Abstracts
Reaching the Golden Age of legal patent status information to facilitate better business decisions
Susanne Hantos, Senior Associate, Davies Collison Cave and President of the Patent Information Users' Group
One only needs to read the news headlines to see that the cost of patent infringement can hamper if not cripple a business. What is at stake here, and how does an organisation determine if it is free to operate in the marketplace? This presentation will explain the reasons why reliable legal status information is critical to sound decision making at a strategic level, and discuss the risks at play. It will look at the legal status data available today and define "must have" requirements for the future, as well as provide some thoughts on the roles of patent offices, governments and the commercial sector in delivering legal status information to enable organisations to make better strategic business decisions.
A journey with patents: from a simple idea to a successful global business
Mario Moretti Polegato, President of GEOX
Mario Moretti Polegato started his journey with patents with his first filing in 1989. After unsuccessful attempts to find a licensee for his invention, Mr Polegato created GEOX and built a brand based on his patented idea. Today, GEOX is a household name around the world, famous for its shoes with breathable soles. This talk will describe how patents have been a constant companion on the way to success, how they were at times a good companion and at times a challenge, and provide food for thought for anyone else thinking about embarking on a similar journey.
EuKTS - The European Knowledge Transfer Society
Frédéric Caillaud, founding member, Licensing Executive Society
The European Knowledge Transfer Society is a brand new European association established to increase the standard and recognition of the KT professionals across Europe. In order to do so, EuKTS is starting to accredit high quality training and will provide certification to future (and existing) KT professionals. Benefits for the companies will be discussed.
How to access legal status information, a user's view and wish list
Gerben Gieling, Synthon BV
Starting with a user's wish list when and how to access legal status, this presentation comes to a definition of what information we would like to have available and a proposal how to organise it. In addition, some positive and negative examples of interfaces will be shown.
Information about the information - the importance of knowing what is in the database
Kristin Whitman, Landon IP
Patent legal status is mysterious, fragmented, and ever-changing, and it may well be the most challenging aspect of patent information. The current sources of legal status information are imperfectly understood due to both lack of coverage documentation, and the difficulty of comparing and interpreting legal status items in a multi-national environment. Advancing our knowledge of this key data is becoming more crucial, as commercial patent search products continue to develop more search functionality around possibly flawed or misleading legal status data.
Distributed legal status services: will we go to the data or will it come to us?
Heiko Wongel, EPO
For many years, the only way of giving comprehensive access to large collections of legal status data was to collect the data from the different sources and to store it in a single database. Today, many data suppliers have installed web services and open data access to their data, giving us new ways of delivering legal status information to the end user. The EPO's Federated Register project is one example of a service that makes use of state-of-the-art technology to deliver data from distributed sources to the user via a unified interface. What are the pros and cons of this principle? Will it enhance the user experience and can it eventually replace the "data collection" model? This presentation raises some of the questions that the subsequent panel discussion will pick up.
PatIris - project of the Italian Directorate for the
Fight against Counterfeiting - Italian Patent and Trademark Office - and the
University of Bologna, Department of Business Economy
Loredana Guglielmetti, Head of Division XI, DGFC-ITPO
Professor Maurizio Sobrero, University of Bologna
Enrico Forti, University of Bologna
PatIris is a web-based tool offering data and dynamic reports on the patenting activity of the Italian public research institutions. The list of monitored institutions is based on the official information reported by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (www.miur.it) and consists of 96 institutions. Using Orbit and considering the problem that each institution has many name variants that make analysis and research difficult and costly, the PatIris team proceeded incrementally with the goal of identifying all the observable name variations. The final database contains all name variants observed on the patent matched with the ‘normal' name listed on www.miur.it.
In the spirit of open data, the results of the disambiguation work carried out within the PatIris project is made available to a widest number of stakeholders as the data provider (Questel Orbit) implemented the normalised names directly in the master database.
Practical tips for retrieving patent information in Italy
Alessandro Piras (chairman of AIDB - Italian Patent Information Users Group), Guido Moradei (patent analyst - Quaestio srl)
The speech focuses on what is the "Made in Italy", SMEs' and major players' role in the innovation process and how Italian creativity is protected. The analysis of the patenting activities in Italy shows that from 1999 to 2012 about 134 300 patent applications were filed at the Italian DGLC-UIBM and, in the same time, almost 52 200 European patent applications were published by EPO, that had at least one Italian applicant. Bibliographic data, texts and legal status of these patent documents can be accessed by combining the use of different tools and databases.
The presentation will provide a short overview about the territorial distribution and the technological profile of patents in Italy, highlighting the results of the "Patents Trademarks and Design Observatory" realised by Unioncamere and Dintec. The speech will introduce to the Italian tools available online and describe the role of the national institutions involved (UIBM and the Italian Chambers of Commerce). It is expected also to provide a series practical tips how to get information about the existing IP and their status.
Patent landscaping in Europe using post grant data - how easy is it?
Marjolaine Thulin, AWAPATENT
Using European patent post-grant data gives another dimension to landscaping a technical area - where are the strong patents, the ones that are challenged, the ones that are kept alive? It is however a challenging task. What data are in fact available and how searchable are they? How does the historical evolution of the EPC system influence the results - new member states added over time, changes in designation fee rates and policy, EPC 2000, the London Agreement, and in the near future the European patent with unitary effect? In this presentation these aspects will be discussed using a case study as an example.