Glaxo's patent on AIDS drug opposed by INP+ in India

Glaxo's patent on AIDS drug opposed by INP+ in India The World Trade Review: "Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), 16-30 April 2006 Mumbai: People living with HIV/AIDS are taking on drug major GlaxoSmithKline's efforts to patent its AIDS-medicine Combivir in India. The Manipur Network of Positive People (MNP+), under the aegis of the Indian Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS (INP+) has filed a pre-grant opposition to GSK's patent application at the Indian Patent office in Kolkata. The pre-grant opposition has been filed for the patient organisations by Lawyers' Collective. Combivir is the backbone of AIDS therapy and is used in the first-line of treatment, Mr Loon Gangte, a HIV-positive person with INP+, told Business Line. GSK's patent application is being opposed on technical and health grounds, he said. Combivir is a fixed-dose combination of two existing AIDS drugs - zidovudine and lamivudine, technically that is not a new invention, Mr Gangte said. GSK officials were not available for comment. A pre-grant opposition allows people to oppose patent applications filed by a company. A decision on the patent is given after the Patent Controller's office hears arguments from different stakeholders. Only recently, the Patent Office in Chennai had rejected Novartis' patent on cancer drug Glivec. Generic or copycat versions of Combivir are available in India from drug-makers such as Cipla, Ranbaxy, Aurobindo, Emcure and Strides. They are priced at about Rs 1,100 per patient, per month. These drug-makers supply to patients to other developing countries too, he said. GSK's Combivir is not available in the local market, said Ms Priti Radhakrishnan of Lawyers' Collective. But international aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) purchases it at about $237 per patient per year compared to the cheapest generic at $182, said Ms Leena Menghaney with Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines and MSF. Generic competition has brought down the price on Combivir-clones. If GSK gets a patent, it becomes a monopoly and could control the price, Mr Gangte said. Though the present product-patent regime in India may allow Combivir-clones to sell provided they pay a royalty to GSK, there is a risk of a price increase. There is no clarity in the law on the royalty to be paid. Either way a price increase is on the cards, he said. Previous Page Next Page Top of the Page"

Overview of Chinese Patent Litigation System

An informative overview of Chinese Patent Litigation System "Patent Litigation in Chinese Courts" by J. Benjamin Bai, Helen Cheng and Peter Wang from JONES DAY appired on Mondaq.com A must read....

State of Innovation in Global Pharma Industry

An article appierd in Forbs Magzine, the state of innovation in Global Pharma Industry as ..........But right now, big drug companies are suffering from an innovation drought. Aitken says that there were only 30 new medicines launched in key markets in 2005, well off the peak of the 1990s. A more encouraging sign: There are 2,300 experimental drugs being tested in humans. In the late stages of human testing, IMS counts 96 cancer drugs, 51 heart treatments, 37 antivirals and 28 potential medicines for arthritis or pain. However, more and more drugs are being developed by biotech--though Aitken argues that this is less of a problem than people think."

TRIPS & Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Alaince worries Western Pharma/ Biotech Companies

TRIPS & Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Alaince worries Western Pharma/ Biotech Companies

Tuesday, January 10, 2006 By Stephanie Weinberg

U.S. biotech firms representing a variety of industries are working to ward off efforts by India, Brazil and other developing countries that want to amend World Trade Organization rules to require patent holders to disclose the origin of their patents and share benefits when those patents are based on genetic plant material or traditional knowledge from developing countries. Failure to meet these new rules would result in the loss of patents if these changes to WTO rules were approved.

The firms expect to create an education campaign this spring to build opposition among other WTO members to demands from India and Brazil, and argue that developing countries could actually be disadvantaged by such rules. In addition, the group hopes to find allies within India's biotech industry, which also could be disadvantaged by the new requirements, they said. This could include Indian companies making patented health care and personal grooming products based on ayurveda, or Hindu traditional medicine.

The U.S. biotech firms have been brought together under the recently formed American BioIndustry Alliance, which includes pharmaceutical companies Merck, Pfizer, Bristol Myers-Squibb and Eli Lilly, as well as General Electric and Procter & Gamble. The membership of companies not strictly in pharmaceuticals shows the issue is important to firms beyond the drug industry, industry sources said. Procter & Gamble, for example, is chiefly interested in how new WTO rules requiring benefits sharing and disclosure of origin could adversely affect its skin care products, an industry source said.

The goal of the group is to prevent such requirements from being incorporated into the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects on Intellectual Property Rights, as demanded chiefly by Brazil, India and Peru. At the December 13-18 WTO ministerial in Hong Kong, those countries successfully negotiated language into the final ministerial text that calls for the WTO director general to intensify his consultations on all outstanding implementation issues, including the relationship between TRIPS and the Convention on Biological Diversity, which covers the use of biological materials.

Paragraph 39 also calls for the WTO General Council to review progress and "take any appropriate action" no later than July 31, 2006 on the implementation issues. Implementation refers to issues during the Uruguay Round that developing countries argue were not effectively implemented, but the only two issues specifically highlighted in paragraph 39 are the traditional knowledge and genetic material issue, and the European Union's demands for protections for foods with geographic names or indications such as Parma ham. Some fear the EU may ultimately support talks on negotiating new rules on the use of traditional knowledge and genetic material if this also allows the GIs issue to move.

U.S. firms would have preferred to see language calling for open-ended consultations rather than a date indicating some decision could be made by this summer, sources said. However, one industry source said open-ended language was too much to expect given the push by Brazil and India for an endorsement of talks on amending WTO rules to be included in the ministerial text. At the same time, the source acknowledged it would be better to have more than six months to consult with other WTO members and potential allies in India as a way to counter the current demands from India, Brazil and Peru.

The July 31 date corresponds to deadlines for members to submit comprehensive draft schedules of commitments in agriculture and industrial market access, although this depends on members meeting a separate deadline agreed in Hong Kong to establish specific negotiating terms or modalities in those areas by April 30. Still, it is conceivable that Brazil and India could use the deadline on these schedules as leverage to win concessions on the TRIPS issue.

However, U.S. industry sources indicated they are hopeful of softening the position of India, which in Hong Kong indicated to the U.S. that its position was based on domestic political reasons, and that its biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry had not raised its voice on the issue, sources said. The ruling party in India shares power with several minority parties, including the Communists, who support introducing WTO requirements for benefits sharing and origin disclosure.

As a result, industry sources said it could be possible to get India to lower its demands if industry groups in that country announced their opposition to rules that would threaten to invalidate a patent if a patent holder failed to share benefits or disclose the origin of related traditional knowledge or genetic material. These sources indicated U.S. groups would reach out to potential supporters in India in the hopes of changing the dynamics there.

Such a scenario, however, is unlikely with Brazil, which is seen as more interested in advocating fundamental changes to TRIPS, sources said.

The alliance will argue to developing countries that creating a mandatory patent disclosure obligation would make it less likely that industry would invest in bio-prospecting in developing countries, which would add to uncertainty in the bio-industry and make it less likely that genetic resource inventions would become commercially viable. This would go against the interest of countries rich in traditional knowledge and genetic material, since these countries would not get to share in any benefits unless products appear on the market.

Determining where genetic material comes from can also be complicated, and is another reason why linking patents to disclosure or benefit sharing would be a bad idea, the alliance argues. For example, questions could be raised about the origin of bio-materials found in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Another possible complication could occur if a company disclosed that the country of origin for its material was India, but it turned out the same material could be found in, for example, China. This could lead to conflicts over how benefits should be shared among various countries.

U.S. firms and the U.S. government have advocated a contractual system for sharing benefits, and have urged members to reject a linkage between patents and benefit sharing, these sources said.

Finally, the alliance argues the goals that would need to be captured in an international regime on access and benefit sharing related to genetic resource inventions go beyond the expertise of the WTO TRIPS Council. It argues the better forum for an agreement would be under the Convention on Biological Diversity, which the U.S. has not ratified. There is also no dispute settlement mechanism under the CBD.

Stephanie Weinberg Trade Policy Advisor Oxfam America

Evaluation of EU Rules on Databases

Interesting development on database protection tracked by BLOG@IP::JUR EXTERNAL LINKRAPID Database: '[...] The European Commission has published an evaluation of the protection EU law gives to databases. EU law protects databases by copyright if they are sufficiently creative. Other databases, especially those that are compilations of information or commonplace data, such as telephone directories, music charts or football match listings, may benefit from a new form of protection introduced by the 1996 Database Directive. This protection is known as the 'sui generis' database right, i.e. a specific property right for databases that is unrelated to other forms of protection such as copyright. The evaluation focuses on whether the introduction of this right led to an increase in the European database industry's rate of growth and in database production. It also looks at whether the scope of the right targets those areas where Europe needs to encourage innovation. Stakeholders are invited to comment on the evaluation by 12 March 2006. [...]' The evaluation paper is available EXTERNAL LINKhere. Policy options discussed therein are: * Option 1: Repeal the whole Directive; * Option 2: Withdraw the 'sui generis' right; * Option 3: Amend the 'sui generis' provisions; and * Option 4: Maintaining the status quo. '[...] Before deciding on its future policy approach with respect to the 'sui generis' protection for 'non-original' databases, the Commission services deem it appropriate to further consult stakeholders on the four policy options outlined above. Stakeholder consultation should also provide further evidence on the economic impact of 'sui generis' protection in stimulating the production of European databases. Stakeholders are invited to submit their observations by 12 March 2006.'"

Unveiling your masterpiece: Find out how to keep an eye on the competition before showing the world your sales and marketing strategies.

An interesting article on importance of Competitor Intelligence by Richard G Ensman. Worth reading ... enjoy

WTO upholds cheaper drugs waiver

It is a great win for humanity as well as opportunities for pharma companies from developing countries like India, in Generic Market producing Life Saving Drugs. The agreement will extend a 2003 temporary rule World Trade Organization (WTO) members have agreed to uphold a rule that allows poor countries to import cheaper copies of patented medicines. Its general council has agreed to make permanent a 2003 waiver that allows poorer nations to import generic drugs to treat serious diseases such as Aids. The measure would become permanent by 1 December 2007, the WTO said. The current waiver remains until then. WTO boss Pascal Lamy said the agreement showed the body's humanitarian concern. 'Landmark' US Trade Representative Rob Portman added that America was fully behind the move. 'This is a landmark achievement that we hope will help developing countries devastated by HIV/Aids and other public health crises,' he said. The European Union (EU) has also backed the change. 'The EU has worked hard for this outcome and welcomes that others have moved to make this possible,' said EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson. And for the UK, Trade Secretary Alan Johnson said 'this announcement should be an important step in making drugs available in poor countries. 'The lack of access to essential medicines in developing countries is one of the biggest health issues - and one of the gravest injustices - in the world.' Under the rule, poorer nations will be allowed to import the generic drugs for humanitarian reasons and not for commercial purposes. Some of the larger developing countries, like India, hope that they will be able to sell antiretroviral Aids drugs to Africa under the deal. "

Patent for 1.4 lakh medicines soon - Newindpress.com

Patently-O: Patent Law Blog: Including Claims in Provisional Patent Applications?: "Including Claims in Provisional Patent Applications? Curtsy-Patently-O: Patent Law Blog: Including Claims in Provisional Patent Applications? An ongoing debate amongst some patent attorneys is whether to include claims in provisional applications. According to the rules of practice, claims are not required in the provisional application. (MPEP 601). However, there are a few good reasons for including claims in the application. In the wake of Phillips v. AWH, it has become even more important to ensure that a patent?s specification accurately describes the meaning of the associated claim terms. This task is all but impossible in the absence of any claim terms to describe. Thus, it is important to draft at least a few model claims with the provisional application. Some practitioners, such as Russ Krajec, have advocated drafting the claims but then deleting them from the application before filing. Russ argues that claims in the provisional can only hurt the applicant. I disagree. The claims can be helpful in ensuring adequate disclosure and enablement ? this is especially true in cases where the provisional is rushed through on a very short deadline and/or low budget. The claims, as part of the specification, can easily tie together loose ends that may have been created in the rush. As Todd Mayover aptly points-out, including claims in the provisional creates a clear record associating those claims with the earliest filing date or priority date. It is also unlikely that patent attorneys would seriously stick to the practice of initially drafting claims that will eventually be deleted ? this is especially true in the fast-paced area of provisional applications. One newfound fear is that including claims in the provisional leaves the patentee open to Festo-type prosecution history estoppel. However, we have no evidence that presenting new claims in a subsequent nonprovisional would create any such estoppel ? especially since the nonprovisional is newly-filed rather than simply an amended version. An astute Patently-O reader provided the following comment: I include at least one extremely broad, never likely obtainable claim in a provisional. First under US law, it is true that a provisional need not include one in order to be considered valid. But foreign courts can say otherwise and render the US provisional (if serving as a priority document) invalid in a foreign court. Not including a provisional claim is only useful if you are absolutely certain that you won't go foreign. I hear the arguments related to the effect of narrowing by amendment as creating PHE. In the post-Festo world, you can at least explain the amendment so as to overcome the presumption of PHE. Let's face it, if you are relying on the DOE to win your case anyway and the case rests on whether you started broad and narrowed by amendment, you are fighting a likely unwinnable battle. In the last 10 years or so, how many DOE cases has the Fed. Circuit actually upheld? Not too many. No U.S. practitioner has been able to cite a case, rule, regulation, expanded Board of Appeals decision, etc. from a foreign court that has categorically said, "A U.S. provisional application serving as a priority document [to this foreign application] that does not include at least one claim is nonetheless considered a permissible priority document." Why take the chance of not including a claim in a provisional if there is a likelihood that the foreign counterpart could get knocked out. Another reason to the include at least a broad claim is that most foreign laws have strict adherence to the rule that the broadest initially presented claim will set the claim scope for the application. So if you present a very broad claim initially, you can amend narrower. But if you present a narrower claim first then realize that you can go broader, you cannot amend to go broader. It is for this reason you can include a "claim" that says something like, "I claim, the product comprising any feature described, either individually or in combination with any feature, in any configuration." or a "process to [...] comprising any process described, in any order, using any modality, ..."

How to Write a Patent Application-Deconstruction and Rebuilding Approach

Anything Under the Sun Made By Man: How to Write a Patent Application ? Deconstruction and Rebuilding Approach: "How to Write a Patent Application ? Deconstruction and Rebuilding Approach Curtsey --Anything Under the Sun Made By Man: ? There are several different styles of patent applications, each being a certain response to a specific business situation and prosecution strategy. I use a deconstruction and rebuilding approach, detailed below, for applications where the prior art is reasonably well known, a product is reasonably well known or anticipated, and thus the claims can be well tailored. For example, if the inventor knows the art very well and has worked at or near the top of the field for a period of time, I have reasonable confidence that they can distinguish their invention and the prior art. Also, if I have a reliable search done using a draft set of claims, we may be confident enough in the prior art to know what would reasonably be allowed by the Patent Office. The method for drafting the patent application is quite simple: deconstruct the invention down to the claims, then rebuild the description to match the claims. This method results in an application that is very tight and fully supports each element of the claims very well, but it might not have much fat or excess that could be used as backup claims if the original claim set must be significantly altered. These applicati"

US again threatns to suspend patent rights on health hazard grounds..

Apprehension about offering the stringent Product Patent protection to Pharma inventions during the TRIPs negotiations are turning the to be true. Even in developed world, companies holding the key patented medicine were reluctant to offer the medicines to the needy people at the time of community health crises and in order to avoid any catastrophy might govts like US has literally threat to them suspend/ revoke their patent rights over the life saving medicine. Perhaps, most of developing countries are not strong enough to compel any such patent holder to make available the life saving drugs to the public on reasonable prices. We have to ensure that natural human lives are always placed above the profit making motives of legal entities. IPBiz: Washington Post on Tamiflu: U.S. bullies IP owners: "Monday, November 07, 2005 Washington Post on Tamiflu: U.S. bullies IP owners But the U.S. isn't a model of respect for intellectual property, either. Panicked by its own lateness, the Bush administration has bullied Roche into opening a new production operation in the United States; if Roche had refused, the administration was ready to break the patent. Sen. Chuck Schumer has gone further, denouncing Roche for elevating profits above health and demanding that the firm license its technology to other drugmakers or face legislation compelling it to do so. Coming on top of similar bullying four years ago of Bayer, the maker of an anti-anthrax drug, this browbeating sends a clear signal: If you make a drug that turns out to be really important, don't expect patent laws to protect you. <-- by Sebastian Mallaby In the earlier CIPRO confrontation, the 'bullying' pertained to negotiation over price, and there was a related fear that such price negotiation could carry over into a prescription plan for Medicare. See 'Where have you gone, Richard K. Lyon,' Intellectual Property Today, Oct. 2001.

Patent Analysis

Patent Data, Analysis & Visualisation by Juan C. Dürsteler Patents are extremely important when configuring the business strategy of technological companies. There are more and more tools that allow you to download and analyse patents in one way or another. Visualisation is a key tool for the analysis and detection of opportunities that is still used shyly. One of the less usual applications of information visualisation is patent visualisation. In fact visualising patent information is just a part of text or document visualisation. In the end, a patent is just text with a certain structure and with a specific objective. Patents encompass several aspects that have, nonetheless, great importance.: * they are a way to protect intellectual property rights o our own rights, allowing us to produce without being copied with inpunity o the other's rights, preventing us of using alien developments. For these reasons patents constitute a very important source of information about the competitors. This makes them the main tool for technological and business intelligence. On the other hand, knowing which patents are enforced in the market is vital before deciding to make a new development or product, with the important investment it means, that could be finally blocked by an existing patent. Many patent offices already allow to freely download abstracts and complete text of their patents. Among them the USPTO from United States or the EPO from Europe, and many others you can find, for example, in the PatentLawLinks.com list. In particular Esp@cenet, the download service of the European Patent Office has become a very popular source of information in this field. Based on the many possibilities of search that all this offers, there have been appearing in the market different systems allowing you to search, download and analyse patents automatically. Many of them are present in the Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) vendors list. Although downloading, classificating, clustering and finding the relationship between patents of similar contents has become quite widespread, even making use of text mining tools, the visualisation of those resuts is not so usual. Anacubis, patent division of the i2 inc group, has some visualisation demos that use i2 inc Analyst's Notebook visualisation tool. Unfortunately some problem with the demo has prevented me from executing it properly, so I can't report on it. Spore.inc provides two main types of visualisations: Patent matrix diagram. Diagrams that represent the substance and hierachical relationships of the claims of a patent. This way, reading and understanding of a patent's claims is much easier. Source: Diagram as can be seen at Spore Inc website. Spore diagram. It produces graphs of patent groups that allow you to see how are they related, identifying trends and detecting development opportunities related to "gaps" in some areas of the patent scope of a product portfolio. Source: Diagram as can be seen at Spore Inc website. But maybe Mathéo Software represents one of the easiest to use systems (you can download a free demo) that incorporates four main types of visualisation that can be produced with many combinations of the different variables that identify a patent. We'll focus on MatheoPatent 6.1. This program allows you to launch a search on different sources according to keywords, inventors, etc. With the downloaded results you can get the following types of visualisation. MatheoPatent 6.1 MatheoPatLista2.gif (182879 bytes) MatheoPatPDate.gif (68024 bytes) Table: Presentation in form of a table where you can see the results of the search. To the left, a list of inventors with their nationalities and number of patents granted. To the right, the list of patents. Below lies the summary of particular patent of the list. Source: Screenshot by the author of the program in execution. Click on the image to enlarge it. Bar chart: Here you can see a bar chart of the number of patents present per year. MatheoPatent allows you to select different variables (inventor, family, date, etc) building bar charts accordingly. Source: Screenshot by the author of the program in execution. Click on the image to enlarge it. MatheoMatrix1.gif (146436 bytes) MatheoGrafo1.gif (82098 bytes) Matrix: By crossing the different variables MatheoPatent allows you to select (inventor, family, date, etc), you can obtain this matrix chart. In this particular case we cross inventors against inventors. The coloured squares in the diagonal indicate the patents of a particular inventor. Big squares indicate groups of inventors acting together. If they are out of the diagonal it means that some inventors or groups participate in patents with other groups. It's possible to cross other variables to detect different patterns Source: Screenshot by the author of the program in execution. Click on the image to enlarge it. Networks: In this case we represent the relationships between inventors and companies by means of a force directed graph where dragging a company you can drag also the inventors related to it as if they were linked by rubber bands. Again we can select different variables to see the networking between them. Source: Screenshot by the author of the program in execution. Click on the image to enlarge it. ¿Do you remember ThemeScape and newsmaps? (see number 93). Finally this technology, renamed as Aureka!, has become the patent visualisation of MicroPatent. This way, this extraordinary form of visualisation has seen its incorporation to the world of patents. Let's recall that ThemeScape allows you to represent a document corpus as a topographic map where the "mountains" are associated with frequent terms (predominant "themes") that are as close as their concepts are similar. Aureka! The patent version of ThemeScape represents as a topographic map the explored document space. Dots depict particular documents (patents) . The closer they are, the most related the patent topics. You can access the documents by clicking on them. Fuente: Image of Aureka! as can be seen at MicroPatent's website in Internet. Patent visualisation is just one more within the possibilities of text mining. Nevertheless, as anyone working in R+D knows, detecting the patents that can prevent us to follow a research line or finding a "hole" where there's nothing patented can be fundamental for the business strategy of a company. Visualisation is vital to open a way through the web of legal text, [sometimes obscure] claims, and the large amount of data that represent the world of patents. We are still an a very preliminar stage in this field. Links of this issue: http://www.uspto.gov/ United States Patent Office (USPTO) http://www.european-patent-office.org/ European Patent Office (EPO) http://www.patentlawlinks.com/patoff.htm PatentLawLinks website http://ep.espacenet.com/ Espacenet EPO download center http://www.piug.org/ Patent Information Users Group web site. http://www.piug.org/vendor.html Patent Information Users Group vendors list. http://www.anacubis.com/ Anacubis website http://www.i2inc.com/Products/Analysts_Notebook/default.asp i2 inc. Analyst's Notebook http://www.sporeusa.com/home/ Spore website http://www.matheo-software.com/ Mathéo Software website http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?num=93〈=2 Num 93 Two years later http://www.micropatent.com/ Micro Patent website

Patent Analysis: Data Analysis & Result Visualisation

Patent Analysis
by Juan C. Dürsteler




One of the less usual applications of information visualisation is patent visualisation. In fact visualising  patent information is just a part of text or document visualisation. In the end, a patent is just text with a certain structure and with a specific objective. 
Patents encompass several aspects that have, nonetheless, great importance.:

• they are a way to protect intellectual property rights


• our own rights, allowing us to produce without being copied with inpunity


• the other's rights, preventing us of using alien developments. 

For these reasons patents constitute a very important source of information about the competitors. This makes them the main tool for technological and business intelligence. On the other hand, knowing which patents are enforced in the market is vital before deciding to make a new development or product, with the important investment it means, that could be finally blocked by an existing patent.
Many patent offices already allow to freely download abstracts and complete text of their patents. Among them the USPTO from United States or the EPO from Europe, and many others you can find, for example, in the PatentLawLinks.com list. In particular Esp@cenet, the download service of the European Patent Office has become a very popular source of information in this field.  
Based on the many possibilities of search that all this offers, there have been appearing in the market different systems allowing you to search, download and analyse patents automatically. Many of them are present in the Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) vendors list. Although downloading, classificating, clustering and finding the relationship between patents of similar contents has become quite widespread, even making use of text mining tools, the visualisation of those resuts is not so usual.
Anacubis, patent division of the i2 inc group, has some visualisation demos that use  i2 inc Analyst's Notebook visualisation tool. Unfortunately some problem with the demo has prevented me from executing it properly, so I can't report on it.
Spore.inc provides two main types of visualisations: 
(image placeholder)
(image placeholder)

Spore Inc
Spore Inc

But maybe Mathéo Software represents one of the easiest to use systems (you can download a free demo) that incorporates four main types of visualisation that can be produced with many combinations of the different variables that identify a patent. We'll focus on MatheoPatent 6.1. This program allows you to launch a search on different sources according to keywords, inventors, etc. With the downloaded results you can get the following types of visualisation.














¿Do you remember ThemeScape and newsmaps? (see number 93). Finally this technology, renamed as Aureka!, has become the patent visualisation of MicroPatent. This way, this extraordinary form of visualisation has seen its incorporation to the world of patents. Let's recall that ThemeScape allows you to represent a document corpus as a topographic map where the "mountains" are associated with frequent terms (predominant "themes") that are as close as their concepts are similar.
(image placeholder)
(image placeholder)

MicroPatent

Patent visualisation is just one more within the possibilities of text mining. Nevertheless, as anyone working in R+D knows, detecting the patents that can prevent us to follow a research line or finding a "hole" where there's nothing patented can be fundamental for the business strategy of a company. Visualisation is vital to open a way through the web of legal text, [sometimes obscure] claims, and the large amount of data that represent the world of patents. We are still an a very preliminar stage in this field.
Links of this issue:
http://www.uspto.gov/



http://www.european-patent-office.org/



http://www.patentlawlinks.com/patoff.htm



http://ep.espacenet.com/



http://www.piug.org/



http://www.piug.org/vendor.html



http://www.anacubis.com/



http://www.i2inc.com/Products/Analysts_Notebook/default.asp



http://www.sporeusa.com/home/



http://www.matheo-software.com/



http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?num=93〈=2



http://www.micropatent.com/

LawMemeVindicated by DNA

Vindicated by DNA Posted by Rebecca Bolin on Monday, August 01 @ 16:09:32 EDT News A friend volunteering for the Innocence Project at Cardozo School of Law sent me this article (typo of Cardoza seems to be AP's) about a man released from prison following a DNA test after serving eighteen years of a wrongful rape conviction. The Innocence Project write-up has some different details than the AP version. My friend was really happy about this. "Isn't this great?!" My feelings are more mixed. It's rather sobering that this can happen in the first place and that a few little mistakes can cost a man with small children so much of his life. I wonder how the victim feels, even if she honestly thought that was the right guy. So, I suppose it's great that science finally showed the truth, but those eighteen years are still lost.

Six Easy Steps to Highly Effective Patent Searching

Six Easy Steps to Highly Effective Patent Searching You can speed up your design cycle time by mining patents for information. Here, a skilled patent attorney shares his secrets to faster and better searches. Craig Fieschko -- Design News, June 6, 2005 A patent is often described as a monopoly (generally limited to 17-20 years) granted to the inventor of a new and useful machine, process, or other invention in exchange for the inventor's complete written description of how to make and use the invention in a patent application. These details can be highly useful to design engineers, who can use patents to learn how others have approached similar problems, what design strategies have and have not worked in the past, and to get a handle on what is state-of-the-art in their field. But with almost 7 million U.S. patents covering virtually every field of technology, it can be a lot like trying to find a needle in a haystack to locate the patents that are most relevant to your design problem. In this article, I share some of the basic search strategies I use as a patent lawyer (and former engineer) to sift through the clutter. This article assumes that you're using the search engines of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). First a Few Basics on Patent Searching Some of my favorite patent-searching resources on the Web are listed in the sidebar, and the following discussion will assume that you're using the search engine of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the government agency that administers the U.S. patent system. While you can simply enter a string of terms into the search engine and obtain all the patents or published applications that contain these terms, the USPTO's search engines, like most patent search engines, helpfully allow "fielded" searching. Terms can be entered in certain fields, such as Title, Abstract, Assignee (Owner), etc., to locate patents or published patent applications having the entered terms in the specified fields (in the specified sections of the patents or applications). The USPTO also allows strings of fielded search terms to be connected with Boolean terms such as AND, OR, and ANDNOT, and parentheses can be used to order the connected terms (see a sample search on page 80). Additionally, the ends of search terms can be truncated and the "wildcard" symbol $ can be substituted to search for variants of the term. For example, "circuit$" will search for the terms circuit, circuits, circuitry, etc. (Note that a term may not be truncated to less than four characters.) Search terms can also be combined in strings by using quotation marks. For example, entering the term "circuit board" (in quotes) will search for the adjacent words "circuit" and "board," in that order. It might seem that a good way of locating relevant patents is to search in the Abstract (ABST) and/or Title (TTL) fields. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Titles are usually vaguely worded because patent attorneys fear the potential ramifications of a specifically worded title. The same is true of most Abstracts, which poorly represent the contents of their documents. So it's no surprise, then, that an Abstract and/or Title search should never be regarded as complete and accurate. A Specification (SPEC) search, which extends to the detailed bodies of the patents or applications, is far more complete. Nevertheless, if a search strategy results in a very large number of hits, it may be preferable to begin a search by limiting it to the Title (TTL) or Abstract (ABST) fields. Other useful search fields include the Assignee (AN) field, which may list the owner of the patent, and/or the Inventor (IN) field. You may be able to find relevant patents by searching for those that name a company and/or inventor who has expertise in your field of interest. Nevertheless, while the use of fields, Boolean connectors, and wildcards can help you locate relevant patents and applications faster, many people still find it difficult to generate relevant search results. All patents and patent applications are assigned "class numbers" by the USPTO codes that classify the patent or application into one or more very particular fields of technology, similar to the Dewey Decimal System. So if you can identify the classes of your problem or technology of interest, and then use the USPTO search engines to search documents in these classes, you'll often find relevant documents much faster. To identify U.S. classes for particular fields of technology, you can access the Manual of U.S. Patent Classification at www.uspto.gov/web/classification/. Unfortunately, most users find the manual confusing and difficult to use, and it usually takes significant experience before one can quickly and accurately locate the appropriate class(es) relating to a technology in question. By following the six easy steps I have outlined on page 80, you can bypass the manual almost entirely (or at least minimize its use) and get superior search results immediately. Now What? Once you're done, you can then use the search results in your research and design efforts. In some cases, you may even be able to adopt a patented invention as an "off-the-shelf" solution. You're usually free to use matter described in a patent so long as: (1) The matter is not secured by this (or another) patent (i.e., the matter is not defined by the "claims" set forth at the end of a patent); or (2) Even if the matter is covered by the claims, if the patent's expired. Usually, patents have terms lasting 20 years from their patent application filing date, or 20 years from the date of patent issuance, whichever date is later. Both of these dates are shown on the first page of a patent. However, patents can (and often do) expire earlier for failure to pay periodic maintenance fees to the USPTO. You can check this out at the USPTO website at https://ramps.uspto.gov/eram/. Nevertheless, if you have questions about whether and how you can use certain matter, you really should get the assistance of a patent attorney. As the old saying goes, "anyone who serves as his own attorney has a fool for a client." Craig Fieschko has a BSME and MSME and worked for several years as an R&D engineer. He is a registered patent attorney at the DeWitt Ross & Stevens law firm, and he also teaches intellectual property law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Request a more detailed version of the article by contacting Fieschko at cf@dewittross.com, or at (608) 828-0722. Step-by-Step Guide to Patent Searching In this example, we look for patents related to handheld, ultrasonic surgical cutting tools On the USPTO's "Advanced Search" page, different fields are searchable by typing in a field code followed by a forward slash. The USPTO also provides a "Quick Search" page (not shown here), where a limited number of fields can be chosen from drop-down boxes. Clicking "Search" will return the patent numbers and titles (or published patent applications) that match the specified terms in the specified fields. You can access the full text of a selected item by clicking on the document number or title. Once you access the full text of a patent or application, you can get an "Image Copy" of the actual document (with drawings, etc.) either by using the "Add to Cart" option and paying to have it sent to you. On the front page of a patent are relevant patent classes at the headings "U.S. Cl." (U.S. Classification), listing the classes of the patent [51] and [52], and "Field of Search," or related classes reviewed by the USPTO when granting the patent [58]. The USPTO Manual of Classification can be searched by entering terms of interest (at right) and then reviewing the resulting classes. Alternatively, you can enter a particular class (at left) and then review its description to see if it’s relevant (see figure below). This is the "Class Schedule" resulting from entry of Class 604/22 in Figure (5), showing a description of Class 604/22 and its surrounding classes. Clicking the icon to the left of each class number will return a list of all patents in the class. 1. IDENTIFY A FEW STARTING PATENTS Use fielded searching in the USPTO Issued Patent search engine (not the Published Application search engine) to locate one or more "starting patents" that have strong relevance to your technology of interest. You only need one (or a handful) of starting patents. See figures above, showing an exemplary search for a handheld, ultrasonic surgical cutting tool. 2. FIND UPSTREAM PATENTS "Upstream patents" are prior patents that the USPTO regarded to be technologically relevant to the starting patents. These are listed on the first pages of the starting patents under the heading "References Cited;" see the list in Figure 4 under "U.S. Patent Documents," or in Figure 3, where the patent numbers of the upstream patents are provided as links, which allow you to quickly access their texts. Review the upstream patents and add any that are relevant to your list of starting patents. Note that only a few upstream patents are usually relevant to what you're looking for; the remainder were cited by the USPTO because they're relevant to some subcomponent or small feature of the starting patents. 3. FIND DOWNSTREAM PATENTS "Downstream patents" are later patents having USPTO citations to the starting patents because the USPTO regarded the starting patents to be technologically relevant. If you're viewing the text of a patent, you can access downstream patents by clicking the "Referenced By" link. Alternatively, you can access the search engine query box and search in the Cited References (REF) field by entering "REF/" followed by the patent number of a starting patent. Review the downstream patents, and if any are relevant, add them to your list of starting patents. 4. ITERATE A search for further upstream and downstream patents—by returning to the second step above—can often prove fruitful. By following this process, you're effectively building the "family tree" for the starting patents by locating patents cited in, or citing to, the growing list of starting patents. 5. IDENTIFY COMMON CLASSES Look at your collected starting patents and identify which classes are cited most frequently on the first page. You can then get a list of all patents in a particular class by accessing the search engine query box and searching in the U.S. Classification (CCL) field. Then review these patents and save those that are of interest (and add them to your starting patents and return to the second step above, if desired). It may also be helpful to now access the Manual of Classification and look at the descriptions of your classes of interest, as well as adjacent classes, to verify that the classes seem relevant to the technology you're seeking. 6. SEARCH ON CLASSES Take your classes of interest (as well as any search strings you used for fielded searching, etc.) and search for relevant published patent applications in the USPTO Patent Application search engine. To reduce frustration, note that some fields in the USPTO Patent Search Engine are different from those in the USPTO Patent Application Search Engine, and some seemingly identical fields behave differently (with the USPTO's "Help" link providing tips for usage). Patent Lawyer Craig Fieschko's Bookmarked Sites USPTO www.uspto.gov The USPTO provides a database of issued patents, and a separate database of published patent applications. (Since it generally takes over 18 months for an application to reach issuance, published applications provide a preview of soon-to-come patents). The site allows users to search the full texts of patents from 1976 onward and patent applications from 2001 onward, and limited searching of earlier patents. Drawback: While the full texts of patents and applications are available, image copies are only printable/downloadable one page at a time unless you pay for e-mail or postal delivery of image copies. Freepatentsonline www.freepatentsonline.com Pat2PDF www.pat2pdf.org These two websites compile full PDF image copies of U.S. patents for free, making them far easier to print and download (and Freepatentsonline allows searching as well). Or, access www.pat2pdf.com (not affiliated with the .org site) to pay for full PDF's of both U.S. and European patents. Freshpatents www.freshpatents.com Enter a search query, and you'll be sent regular updates of corresponding newly published U.S. patent applications. European Patent Office http://ep.espacenet.com The EPO's esp@cenet patent database allows free access to the patents of most major patenting countries, though searching is crude and image copies are printable/downloadable only one page at a time. However, by accessing "Online Public File Inspection" at http://my.epoline.org/portal/public under the Products and Services menu, you can download full PDF copies of European patents, provided you have the publication/application number. Delphion www.delphion.com One of the oldest and most powerful patent search engines, Delphion allows multiple databases (basically, all those noted above, and more) to be searched simultaneously. Disadvantage: Formerly free, now it's pay to play.

European Commission Proposes New I/P Directive

I/P Updates: European Commission Proposes New I/P Directive: "European Commission Proposes New I/P Directive On 12 July 2005, the European Commission proposed a new directive on 'criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property rights.' Under the proposed directive, all intentional infringements of an intellectual property right on a commercial scale, and attempting, aiding or abetting and inciting such infringements are treated as criminal offences. The proposal for a framework decision also sets a threshold for criminal penalties including at least four years' imprisonment if the offence involves a criminal organisation or if it jeopardises public health and safety. The applicable fine must be at least EUR 100 000 to EUR 300 000 for cases involving criminal organisations or posing a risk to public health and safety. However, the proposal allows Member States to apply tougher penalties. According to the press release by the EC, 'the Commission hopes that this clear political signal reflecting the determination to combat piracy and counterfeiting will be supported by concerted, long-term information campaigns by national and regional authorities and other interested parties to raise awareness, not only among key players in the fight against counterfeiting and piracy but also amongst the wider public as a whole.' Click here for a primer on European Union law."

Patent Searching an Effective Tool for Competitive Intelligence

Patent Searching an Effective Tool for Competitive Intelligence Article by Vinod Singh A lot of valuable information is now available of the industries in different databases in the web. Among all those patents the most important and easily available. Patent searching can give insights into the state of the art across any technical field. It can provide a platform to monitor the competitors activities by revealing which companies are involved in a field of technology of your interest. Patent searching data can also reveal the technological road map to a particular invention, the science or logic behind the invention, and its intended application. However the legal nature of patents makes them an uncompromisingly formal style. They are written in a language sometimes so abstruse that it does more to obscure the nature of the invention than to elucidate it. Also the millions of patents exited are distributed across different databases and in each case coded and grouped according to one of several classification systems. The family patent information is also varied from various databases. The skilled patent search requires in-depth knowledge of an array of software tools, search commands, searching techniques and classification systems. That’s why patent searching is an expert's job. In the recent few years the demand for a professional patent searcher has increased. Main benefits of free-access Web databases are that they provide a low-cost means of doing initial background searches. The problem is that they suffer serious drawbacks for more crucial searches. For example: free databases generally come from the patent issuing authorities (usually national patent offices) so their content is restricted to those patents granted by that particular authority. There is no universal structure, so the same fields may not necessarily be searchable across different databases. There is no 'added value' - such as readable abstracts in plain English, which has given patent information-provider Thomson Derwent its enviable reputation. There are rarely any patent analysis technologies. And they do not provide the option of sophisticated, command driven, Boolean searches as offered by powerful tools from host companies such as Dialog, Delphion, Questel-Orbit, MicoPat and STN - which also allow parallel searches across several (commercial and free) databases at once. More importantly, a quick and easy search on a free site is extremely unlikely to uncover 'stealth patents' or "hidden patents"- one of the latest IP protection tricks. The authors of these patents deliberately choose obfuscating keywords and try to have their patents inappropriately classified in order that others' searches do not throw them up. Whereas commercial patent database providers provide access to patent collections throughout the world, along with value-added patent information, various analytical tools and other technologies. A number of these commercial providers have recently released innovative new functionalities alongside the search function Why Conduct a Patent Search? 1. Patent searches are conducted for many purposes. Among them are to: 1. Determine if a particular invention is unique 2. Identify potential features for new product 3. Identify other possible uses for a new product 4. Determine independent inventors or companies currently or historically obtaining patents in a particular area 5. Find the patent(s) for a particular invention 6. Determine the state of the art in a particular area 7. Identify patents in a specific field for generating citation maps (a tool in determining the relative importance/value of a specific invention 8. Study the rate of innovation in a particular area 9. Determine the patent portfolio of a specific company 10. Determine if an invention infringes upon the intellectual property rights of others 11. Learn about an industry or a specific company 12. Search for potential solutions to design or safety problems 13. Identify potential licensees 14. To identify additional reference materials (journal articles, books, product literature) of use to those working in this area. Patents often list printed reference materials. 15. Identify inventors working in a certain field. Patent search Procedure: 1. The Steps 1. Search the web to get the up to date information about the area of work and select the specific keywords describing the area of interest and identify the control patents. To start with by searching for any specific patents be aware of in this area, patents of companies work in this field, patents invented by inventors in this field, etc. This step is called "shoot from the tip". 2. Try a few relevant words in the word search engine and see what turns up. If turned up any patents in the "shoot from the hip" step above, examine them for possible search words. Record the search words on a page in a project notebook and add other words as they come to mind or encounter them in other patents. Usually the word list becomes separated into groups of words covering different aspects of the invention. 3. Access the Classification Index. In paper it is about the size of a small town phone book. Look up your topic and you will find a class number. The area you are interested in may have several class numbers (for example marine propulsion and propellers (impellers) are in two different classes). 4. Access the Manual of Classification (in paper it is a large 3 volume set of ring binders). Turn to or click to the class you are interested in and identify the specific subclass's best relating to your topic. You may need some assistance in understanding the hierarchial listing of subclasses. Many are subclasses of subclasses. 5. Access the Classification Definitions. It used to be on microfiche, but now you can access it online. Look up the specific class and subclass under study. Make sure you are really hunting for items resembling the definition of this class/subclass. Often additional hints are given for other places to look, including classes no longer existing. 6. Keep cycling through the three tools (Classification Index, Manual of Classification and Classification Definitions) until you identify the appropriate classes and subclasses. 7. Search the database to identify patents in the classes/subclasses identified. 8. Examine the ABSTRACT & IMAGE of these patents to identify those resembling your device. Make copies of the drawings, abstract and description of patents closely resembling your invention and of inventions serving the same purpose. After completing Steps 1 to 7, examine the patents for: 1. Companies frequently appearing as assignees (patents assigned to them). Search for other patents assigned to these companies in an attempt to identify more patents in the area of interest. 2. Inventors frequently appearing on the patents (both independents and those working for companies). Search for other patents listing these individuals as inventors in an attempt to identify more patents in the area of interest. 3. Look for words and combinations of words in the patents of interest. Sort the words into groups. Some will describe one aspect of the invention and some will describe another. Record the search words on the list started earlier. Search for other patents containing these words in an attempt to identify more patents in the area of interest. Be aware of what portion of the patent you are searching (some search abstract only, front page only, full texts). 4. Examine the patents cited as reference by the patents of interest to see if some of them are of interest as well. 5. Examine the class and subclass info of the patents of interest in an attempt to identify other classes and subclasses that may contain patents of interest. Search these new classes/subclasses for additional patents of interest. 9. Keep cycling through steps 1 to 8 over and over until no more patents of interest are identified. Conclusion The patent search has become an effective tool for the mining of the patent data, which help in the competitive analysis. A throughout knowledge of the different patent database, their classification system is required for a in depth patent search. Patent search is crucial for the patentability, validity, infringement analysis etc. Thus a skilled patent search professional must know the various search procedures, databases limitations and technical tools and software to reveal a good search result.

Intellectual property as an economic asset: key issues in valuation

Intellectual property as an economic asset: key issues in valuation and exploitation Background and Issues http://academy.epo.org/schedule/2005/e02/background_report.pdf

Best resources in intellectual property and asset management 

http://www.ipambestpractices.com/Info/BPLibraryIndex.html
Intellectual Property Best Practices Library:  Summaries

http://www.ipmenu.com/
IP Menu – Global Intellectual Property

http://www.providersedge.com/docs/km_articles/Managing_Knowledge_for_Advantage_-_Technologies.pdf
Managing Knowledge for Advantage: Content & Collaboration Technologies

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Making Knowledge Pay
Companies find that their intellectual processes and assets, if
properly packaged and sold, can yield surprising top-line revenues

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Delphion to Deliver Enterprise Software for Generating Corporate Value
from Intellectual Assets

Open Source isn't just for code anymore... What do fashion, yoga, and libraries have in common? All are dealing with the issues of "intellectual property" and "open source." The fashion industry has a long history of valuing creativity and accepting the sharing and "remixing" of fashion ideas. Meanwhile, a teacher of the 5000 year old practice of yoga has copyrighted his methods and poses and is being opposed by an "open source yoga" movement. And, at the recent O'reilly Emerging Technology Conference, the theme was "Remix your world" and included Lawrence Lessig speaking about copyright, and Cory Doctorow spelling out the dangers of Digital Rights Management, and a fascinating presentation by Clay Shirky on Ontologies. Read on... * Ready to Share On January 29, 2005, the Norman Lear Center held a landmark event on fashion and the ownership of creativity. The event had an incredible variety of participants including John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation), musician and producer T Bone Burnett, Danger Mouse (creator of the Grey Album), and Siva Vaidhyanathan (Professor of Culture and Communication at New York University). More than any other industry, fashion treats a far larger portion of its creative output as a commons - shared resources that can be freely reused and transformed by other creators. Ready to Share is funded in part by a generous gift from the Center for the Public Domain. For lots more information see the press coverage and press releases page. For a quick overview of the issues, see the opinion piece, Control of creativity? Fashion's secret By David Bollier and Laurie Racine. Christian Science Monitor, September 09, 2003. * Bikram goes to the mat, By Hilary E. MacGregor. Los Angles Times, March 21, 2005. After he sued an Orange County yoga studio for copyright and trademark infringement in 2002, a small group of yogis went on the counterattack. Taking a page from the "open source" movement in the computer software world, they called themselves "Open Source Yoga Unity." * O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, March 2005, San Diego, Ca. o press coverage o Doctorow: All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites by Cory Doctorow, For the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. San Diego, California, 16 March 2005. Likewise, DRM has exacted a punishing toll wherever it has come into play, costing us innovation, free speech, research and the public's rights in copyright. And likewise, DRM has not stopped infringement: today, infringement is more widespread than ever. All those costs borne by society in the name of protecting artists and stopping infringement, and not a penny put into an artist's pocket, not a single DRM-restricted file that can't be downloaded for free and without encumbrance from a P2P network. o Lessig: Re:MixMe. Audio (MP3) of presentation by Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, Thursday, March 17. o Shirky: Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata. Abstract of presentation by Clay Shirky, Wednesday, March 16. Ontology, far from being an ideal high-order tool, is a 300-year-old hack, now nearing the end of its useful life. The problem ontology solves is not how to organize ideas but how to organize things--the Library of Congress's classification scheme exists not because concepts require consistent hierarchical placement, but because books do.