Archive for the ‘Patents’ Category

We found this very interesting article about the emerging Chinese technology market and why language barriers between Asia end Europe and a lack of IP monitoring can result in severe patent infringements.

“The door is wide open for industrial espionage”

German construction & engineering magazine ke NEXT spoke to Dr. Alexander Wurzer of Wurzer & Kollegen Germany about China and why it has not been easy for the industry. He explains what the industry should be paying attention to. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we would like to draw your attention to an interesting conference in London next week. “Managing IP’s – International Patent Forum” in London is free for in-house patent counsels, R&D professionals and academics. MultiLing is an official sponsor of this outstanding event that will be attended by EPO President Benoît Battistelli and many other impressive speakers.

The forum will cover:

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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has adjusted certain patent fee amounts for fiscal year 2012 in order to reflect fluctuations in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). This adjustment was adopted under the name of Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (Public Law 112-29) and was signed by the President on September 16, 2011. The fee provision imposes a 15% surcharge on all patent fees authorized under 35 U.S.C. § 41(a), (b), and (d), including Filing Fees, Search Fees, Examination Fees, Issue Fees and Maintenance Fees. Independent inventors, small business concerns, and non-profit organizations who meet the requirements of 35 U.S.C. 41(h) (1) are entitled to a fifty-percent reduction for those fees.
The surcharge on certain patent fees is effective 10 days after enactment (i.e., September 26, 2011). Any fee amount that is paid on or after the effective date of the proposed fee adjustment is subject to the new fees in effect. The amount of the fee to be paid will be determined by the time of filing.
The aim of the patent fee adjustment is to ensure proper funding for effective operations of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
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Since 2009, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) offers the Peer To Patent project – a historic initiative that opens the patent examination process to public participation for the first time. Peer to Patent is an online system that aims to improve the quality of issued patents by enabling the public to supply the USPTO with information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications.
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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently announced the Full First Action Interview Pilot Program, which is an expansion of the Enhanced First Action Interview Pilot Program so as to include all utility applications in all technology areas and filing dates.

With the First Action Interview program the applicant is entitled to a first action interview, upon request, prior to the first Office action on the merits. This program is a pilot and will run through May 16, 2012. A request to participate in the program must be filed before May 16, 2012, and at least one day before a first Office action on the merits of the application appears in the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Read the rest of this entry »

The new EU Patent that is currently being debated within the European Union is completely different from the existing European patents, which are granted under the European Patent Convention (EPC).

European patents, once granted, become a bundle of nationally enforceable patents, in the designated states. Enforcement must be carried out through national courts in individual countries and revocation cannot be accomplished centrally once the nine-month opposition period has expired. Current procedures to apply for a patent are complicated and expensive. Once granted by the European Patent Office (EPO), patents have to be validated by every EU country where the inventor wishes to have protection. Apart from the administrative formalities, this procedure involves considerable expenses for translation. To protect an invention throughout the EU, a company has to pay up to € 32.000, as opposed to € 1.850 on average in the US. Read the rest of this entry »

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) recently launched an online machine translation tool. It allows users to translate the titles and abstracts of inventions from English to French and Chinese and vice versa. Other language pairs, notably Korean-English and Japanese-English are being studied. The tool is a WIPO in-house development using Moses open source technology and has been specifically trained with bilingual corpuses of text from the patent field, taking account of the International Patent Classification (IPC).
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As a follow-up this week’s blog post concerning special regulations due to the Japan Earthquake, we provide more links to Asian Patent and Trademark Offices offering detailed information.

Hong Kong
Korea (patents)
Korea (trademarks)
Taiwan

Detailed information from the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) in Japanese can be found here.

On Monday the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published an official notice outlining special accommodations available to patent and trademark applicants and owners affected by the catastrophic events that took place in Japan on March 11, 2011. Detailed information is also given by the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) the European Patent Office (EPO) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).
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