Patent Information News

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recommended making it machinereadable
and including links to the
classification symbols the examiner
had searched. They also hoped that
the EPO would one day publish the
search strategy together with the
search report itself.
In a total of eight discussion rounds,
current topics in patent information
were discussed by the participants
and the EPO’s experts. The conclusions
are shown in the table below.
The prospect of patent searches
being done by a computer provoked
a lot of debate following the two
keynote talks. Luis Ignacio Vicente
del Olmo of Spanish company
Tele fónica set the scene, describing a
dramatic increase in the number of
patent applications in the field of ICT
(information and communications
technology). ICT, seen to gether with
other developments such as the
Internet of Things and Big Data
was creating new challenges. He
introduced an EU-funded project
called CIFRA (Challenging the ICT
Patent Framework for Responsible
Innovation) that was identifying
imperfections in the patent system.
Personally, he said, he would recommend
focusing on increased transparency.
For him, this meant access
to worldwide legal status information,
tools to look at enterprises'
patent port folios and, in the longer
term, patent ownership information,
as well as clear reasoning from
patent offices when they granted or
refused a patent.
EPO principal director Grant Philpott
took the discussion further, looking
at the 4th Industrial Revolution
(Industry 4.0) and predicting it
would have a dramatic effect on
society. "No job would be safe", he
said, "if it is routine, a computer will
do it." He noted that computers
were already capable of analysing
legal cases, citing studies that
showed a remarkable level of
synchronisation with the human
judges who had handled the cases
in real life. It was only a matter of
time, he concluded, before patent
searching would be automated.
Main conclusions of the discussion rounds at the EPO Patent Information Conference 2016
Discussion round
Conclusions
Search strategies – what are
we learning from the EPO's pilot
project?
Harmonising and simplifying legal
status codes
1. Make search reports machine-readable
2. Links to classification symbols
3. Publish together with search report
1. Need for harmonisation in legal status codes across offices
2. Fewer and clearer codes
3. Clarity in grouping (hierarchy)
Open data in patents – recent
developments in Europe and
beyond
What's the importance of patent
indicators in patent valuation?
Linking patent data and business
data - why do it, and what are the
hurdles?
Are data protection issues
hampering our access to patent
information?
1. Need for data accuracy and global standards
2. Fair use policies essential
3. Services needed for non-experts
1. It is time to create a new user group for patent statistics and patent analysis
2. Users need a dedicated training programme in this area
1. Accurate patent assignee and ownership data is essential
2. More data required from Asia and from SMEs
3. The 18-month rule for patent publications delays data's availability
1. Patent searchers should be aware of the European data protection
directive, as it will affect their work
2. Non-patent literature and copyright affects the patent searcher's access
to good prior art
Freedom-to-operate:
what does the client expect from
the patent searcher?
1. Need for better OCR data, better machine translations and more full-text
data from around the world
2. Legal status data from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America
is of growing importance
3. For viewing, more highlighting features in the texts, and multiscreen
viewing would aid searchers
Patent information from Asia –
still the challenge it used to be?
1. Today's challenges concerning Chinese utility models, and patents
in India, Russia, ASEAN and Iran
2. Constant improvements to English language services
(machine translations, English website interfaces) are essential
Grant Philpott, EPO principal director
and keynote speaker at the EPO Patent
Information Conference 2016
He saw the patent searcher's future
in very advanced searching and
evalua tion.
This conclusion tied in well with the
presentations on legal status at the
end of the conference by patent
attorneys Tobias Wuttke and
Susanne Hantos. Both of these
speakers saw a growing need for
patent searchers to understand
legal status information, and by
implication, the underlying patent
laws (see separate article on page
6 and 7).
Other topics covered in the conference
programme were full-text
and semantic searching, patent
monitoring and citation analysis.
Many of the presentations are available
on the EPO Patent Information
Conference website:
www.epo.org/pi-conference
2 Patent Information News 4 | 2016 December 2016