- Email: [email protected]
Computerized legal status processing and retrieval system
World Patent Information, Printed in Great Britain.
Vol. 11, No. 4,
pp. 193-196,
1989.
0172-2190/89$3.00+.00. Maxwell Online Inc. 0 1989 CEUWIPO
Computerized Legal Status Processing and Retrieval System A. P. Kolesnikov and Yu. V. Sipapin, All- Union Institute of Patent Information, MOSCOW,U.S.S.R.
Summary
of data about amendments patent documents, search in a set of indexes of the legal magnetic tapes with current
The article describes the setting up of a computerized legal status data processing and retrieval system in SPA ‘POISK’ of the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries of the U.S.S.R. After studies of various indexing tables for amendments of legal status in various countries, it was found to be impossible to develop a unified indexing table except for CMEA-member countries. Different coding tables are used, as described, for other countries.
This system is under development basis with the CMEA-countries’
At present, the first release of the system is operational. It processes information about amendments in the legal status of protecting documents of the CMEA-member countries (except for Hungary), the U.S.A., F.R.G., Switzerland and France. The annual document volume is about 200 000 documents. Each information message about the change the legal status deals with the following items:
To solve these problems, it is necessary to search data about a change of the legal status for a long time scope. The search term depends on the effective period of the protecting document, which is established by the patent legislation for each country with a due account for possible prolongation of the patent for certain countries.
a document
of
country,
publication
country,
an amendment publication source (the type of the source is a patent journal, amendment list, register, number, part, month and year of the journal issue, an amendment list issue date and office register amendment date), a document
number,
a document
type code,
an amendment index), a record
The need to solve these problems has initiated a development of the computerized legal status data processing and retrieval system in SPA ‘POISK’ of the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries of the U.S.S.R. are acquisition,
processing
an amendment
The fast determination of the legal status of the patent document in a large information collection is possible only with the use of an appropriate computerized system which should collect, accumulate and update data about all the changes in patent processing in a period from the first publication of an application to the issue of a protection document and about all the further amendments during a certain period after its issue.
of the system
on a cooperative patent offices.
The main information sources of the system are the Official Journals and amendment lists which regularly provide publications concerning various changes of the legal status of patent documents.
Research of the legal status of a patent document is an important stage of the patent legal studies carried out by the users of patent information. On the first hand. it is required in the patent infringement research of technical articles, in patent licensing, in determining the need of keeping the patent in effect, in case of patenting abroad, in rendering patent services when the patent rights are violated, etc.
The tasks
of the legal status of a database, creation of status amendments and data.
a content
identifier
(a classification
status, (text) of the amendment.
In the course of system development, a major problem has been the creation of the data retrieval language.(l) The importance of this problem is due to
collection 193
194
A. P. Kolesnikov
a large variety of amendments of the legal status which differ considerably in their contents and depend on particularities of the patent legislation and practice of each country. The information-retrieval language (IRL) of the system includes the legal status amendment indexing tables and the bibliographic data language. The lexics of the IRL forms a set of bibliographic items and identifiers of these items (INID codes). The INID codes can be considered as semantic qualifiers of the 1RL lexic units. The IRL syntax of bibliographic data is determined by a fixed sequence of bibliographic items on the machine-readable medium. Before the indexing tables were developed, the practice of research on publishing information messages about the amendments of the legal status presented in the patent journals and amendment lists for countries to be processed for 2 or 3 years, the U.S.S.R. All-Union Patent Library specialist experience in creating a manual card file of the legal status, the amendment codes used by INPADOC in the Patent Rights Service (PRS) had been analysed and a question of using the WIPO ICIPLCIXIVI7 recommendations on indexing the headings of notices published in the Official Journals (further WIPO indexing tables) had been investigated. In the course of this study an experiment has been carried out on parallel indexing of the legal status amendments using both the WIPO codes and CMEA-country legal status codes. The latter have been developed within the framework of the International Patent Information System (IPIS). The above experiment has proved the practical uselessness of the recommendations on indexing of the headings of the notices published in the Official Journals for full indexing for all the types of amendments. The reasons are the inaccuracies in the design of the WIPO indexing tables, ambiguities in understanding indexing divisions and the presence of the non-informational divisions. This can be explained by the fact that they are intended to identify the divisions of the various levels, they do not reflect completely the contents of data encompassed in them and, therefore, are inexpedient for indexing in the computerized system. The analysis of the possibility of applying INPADOC codes has exposed the following.
the
and Yu. V. Sipapin
leaving a possibility to use (depending on a detail of the amendment) three or two position codes. These codes can be alphabetic, numeric or mixed ones. Some of the INPADOC indexing systems are the same as the national systems. For instance, to index the French legal status amendments, the ‘Listes’ index codes supplied by the French Patent Office are employed. As a rule, these codes are abbreviations of various types. When the patent document legal status amendment codes are indexed for the F.R.G. patent documents, a special indexing system is used. For example, the ‘Anderung in der Person, in Namen order in Wohnort des Anmelders’ (amendment in a person status, name or whereabouts of the applicant) amendment can be coded by three different codes depending on the part of the ‘Patentblatt’ journal where this amendment is published. If they are published in the first part, ‘Offengelegte Patentanmeldungen’ (Advertised applications), they are indexed with the code OGA. When they are published in the second part under the heading, ‘Bekanntgemachte Patentanmeldungen’ (published accepted applications), they are indexed with the code BGA. If they are published in the third part, ‘Erteilte Patente’ (issued patents), they are indexed with the code EGA. In all three cases, the first two letters of the code are the first letters of the journal part name while the last letter corresponds to the initial letter of the word Anmelder (applicant). The amendment, ‘Application Made for Amendment of Specification’, published in the Official Journal (Patents) of Great Britain is indexed with INPADOC code 429A. Here, the first digit of the code specifies that this amendment concerns a patent document issued according to the British Patent Law of 1949. the second and third letters of the code designate an article of this law, e.g. article 29 (specification amendments sanctioned by the controller). The studies conducted have proved that it is unreasonable to develop the unified indexing table for amendments of the legal status for all the countries, except for the CMEA-member countries. The amendment indexing table for the CMEA-member country patent documents is a list of two-position codes. The first position is numeric and serves to identify a generic heading, the second position is a Roman letter (the further code qualification). For instance:
The INPADOC PRSQ,“) processes amendments in the legal status of the patent documents originated in Austria, Switzerland, F.R.G., European Patent Office, France, Great Britain, The Netherlands, and WIPO. To index the amendments of the legal status, INPADOC uses four-position alpha-numeric codes
Expiration of a patent, 0 expiration of a patent on refusal, l expiration of a patent on duties unpaid, l expiration of a patent on its term expired,
1 1A 1B IC
Computerized
Cancellation, a complete cancellation of an author’s certificate, patent, l partial cancellation of an author’s certificate, patent,
Legal Status
3 3A 3B
To index amendments of the legal status of the F.R.G. patent documents, the indexing table including all the major amendments of the legal status of patents published in the F.R. G. OfJicial Journal, ‘Patentblatt’, is used. All the amendments fall into five divisions, each consisting of several subdivisions. Each amendment in the indexing table is coded by the four-position digital code. The first digit of the code, ‘8’, indicates that the F.R.G. patent document legal status amendments, published according to the Patent Law of 16 December 1980, are processed. The second digit of the code, ‘3’, indicates that amendments to the issued patents published in part 3, ‘Erteilte Patente’ (‘issued patents’), are processed. The third and fourth digits serve for further qualification of a concept within the generic heading. The indexing table of the U.S. patent status amendments contains 17 headings grouped in 10 divisions. All the amendments are coded by four-position alphabetic codes, an acronym for each type of an amendment or their combination. For instance: Disclaimer and DEdication, REquest for REexamination
field,
DIDE RERE
Each of 12 divisions of the indexing table for Switzerland is coded with alphabetic codes similar to the codes of the U.S. patent status amendments: LGschungen Nationler Patente (cancellation of national patents), Lijschungen Europaischer Patente (mit Wirkung fur die Schweiz und Liechtenstain) [cancellation of European patents in effect in Switzerland and Liechtenstein], It is worth noting that the tables are flexible IRL means.
developed
195
Processing
to the developed indexing tables, marking specific data items, keying data to magnetic tapes and input to the database. The database includes the following data items: a publication country code, an amendment source, a document number, a document type code, an amendment code according to the indexing table, a record status, the amendment contents (for specific amendment types). The information services prepared by the include monthly and annual indexes. The indexes are of three types: (1)
(2)
(3)
document number
__*
document number
-document
indexing code
type
type &amendment contents 4document number +
The first searches search by to obtain
document
amendment source
system annual
----+indexing code &indexing code
-amendment source
-document tYPe -amendment contents
two indexes are intended for manual by a document number, the third, for the indexing codes, and this can be used statistics.
The system also prepares a monthly cumulative magnetic tape containing data entered throughout the previous month. Data are ordered alphabetically by the publication country codes, the amendment type and document numbers. In the batch processing mode, the subscribers the system can search by two kinds of queries: (i) (ii)
by a document number, by a legal status amendment
indexing
of
code.
LONP
LOEP indexing
They can include some additions in the course of their usage without the need to change their overall structure. This is of a particular value in creating a retrospective database, since during a scope of from 17 to 20 years, patent legislation of a particular country can undergo some amendments which should be reflected in the indexing tables used. The process of handling data concerning the amendments of the legal status includes indexing of the notices contained in the Official Journal according
In addition to the search query responses, the system provides statistics about the contents of the ‘Legal status’ database (a full or short report) for a specified period of time, for one or a number of countries, for a specific type or all the types of amendments, for one type of the data source or for all the types. In local and remote access modes, the users can search by three types of queries: (i) (ii) (iii)
by a number of the patent by an amendment type, for statistics.c4)
system’s
document,
The system allows the user to access the indexing code tables as one of the help functions. The system is interactive and menu-driven. The screens of the video terminals in the and remote access modes are given below.
local
196
A. P. Kolesnikov
Types of screen display A. 1, Input; 2. 29 October 1987; 3, legal status; 4, time 00.2; 5, amendment type query; 6, publication country; 7, amendment code; 8. year, month, number of issue; 9, source type; 10, document number; 11, amendment contents; 12, an example of the search results in the ‘Legal status’ database by the amendment type. R. 1, Input; 2. 29 October 1987; 3, legal status: 4, time 10:16:54.7; 5, statistics on the amendment type; 6, publication country; 7, amendment code; 8. source type; 9. year, month of issue; 10, number of documents; 11, total; 12, example of statistics on the amendment type issued by the ‘Legal status’ database. c’. 1, Legal status; 2, amendment indexing table; 3, time 19:32:24.5; 4, text in the original language; 5, text in Russian; 6, amendment type; 7, act modifying the rights attached to the application for a patent or to a patent; 8. notification of public adjudication; 9, action on requesting the property rights; 10. restoration action; 11, cancelling a decision of transforming an application to a patent, to a certificate of the utility; 12. input; 13,2 November 1987; 14, a fragment of the indexing table presented on the terminal screen from the ‘Legal status’ database.
and Yu. V. Sipapin
The database is intended to be used by the readers of the U.S.S.R. All-Union Patent Library in the telecommunication mode. In addition, the ‘Legal status’ database is prepared for an access of the users via the National Data networks as well as within the framework of the International Scientific and Technical Information network for foreign customers via VNIIPAS-NTSAO. The main direction of further development of computerized processing of data about amendments of the patent document legal status is the extension of the retrospective collection of the database for countries which have already been processed for 16-20 years (the patent effective time), and the incorporation of data on amendments of patents of other countries that are of a maximum interest to the users. In perspective, the ‘Legal status’ database should be integrated with other databases of SPA ‘POISK’ which contain the more detailed items of the bibliographic description and, primarily, the IPC indexes and applicants.
References
-__
(1) A. I. Klimacheva, D. 1, 14 April 1988; 2, legal status; 3, time 16:25:45.8; 5, publication country; 6, document number; 7, source type; 8. document type; 9, year; 10, month; 11. journal part number; 12, amendment type; 13. amendment of person, name or whereabouts of applicant; 14. amendment contents; 15. example of search results in the ‘Legal status’ database by the document number.
L. V. Borodina and L. V. Konstanttnova. Problems of develonment of IRL for computerized handling of data about patent document legal status amendments. Computerized systems of patent information. M. VNIIPI
(3 (3)
(3)
1233120; 1984. 0. Auracher. INP.4DOC Patent Rights Service. International Symposium (Varna, 1YHO). Role of patent information in technology transfer. M. Vh’ZlPI, 1081. Patent Register Services on Microfiche, PRS. Technical description 311. INPITD/311IOIE. August, 1975). A. P. Kolcsnikov, Information about legal status of patent documents. Inverrrive Activify No. 5, lY86.
Vol. 11, No. 4,
pp. 193-196,
1989.
0172-2190/89$3.00+.00. Maxwell Online Inc. 0 1989 CEUWIPO
Computerized Legal Status Processing and Retrieval System A. P. Kolesnikov and Yu. V. Sipapin, All- Union Institute of Patent Information, MOSCOW,U.S.S.R.
Summary
of data about amendments patent documents, search in a set of indexes of the legal magnetic tapes with current
The article describes the setting up of a computerized legal status data processing and retrieval system in SPA ‘POISK’ of the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries of the U.S.S.R. After studies of various indexing tables for amendments of legal status in various countries, it was found to be impossible to develop a unified indexing table except for CMEA-member countries. Different coding tables are used, as described, for other countries.
This system is under development basis with the CMEA-countries’
At present, the first release of the system is operational. It processes information about amendments in the legal status of protecting documents of the CMEA-member countries (except for Hungary), the U.S.A., F.R.G., Switzerland and France. The annual document volume is about 200 000 documents. Each information message about the change the legal status deals with the following items:
To solve these problems, it is necessary to search data about a change of the legal status for a long time scope. The search term depends on the effective period of the protecting document, which is established by the patent legislation for each country with a due account for possible prolongation of the patent for certain countries.
a document
of
country,
publication
country,
an amendment publication source (the type of the source is a patent journal, amendment list, register, number, part, month and year of the journal issue, an amendment list issue date and office register amendment date), a document
number,
a document
type code,
an amendment index), a record
The need to solve these problems has initiated a development of the computerized legal status data processing and retrieval system in SPA ‘POISK’ of the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries of the U.S.S.R. are acquisition,
processing
an amendment
The fast determination of the legal status of the patent document in a large information collection is possible only with the use of an appropriate computerized system which should collect, accumulate and update data about all the changes in patent processing in a period from the first publication of an application to the issue of a protection document and about all the further amendments during a certain period after its issue.
of the system
on a cooperative patent offices.
The main information sources of the system are the Official Journals and amendment lists which regularly provide publications concerning various changes of the legal status of patent documents.
Research of the legal status of a patent document is an important stage of the patent legal studies carried out by the users of patent information. On the first hand. it is required in the patent infringement research of technical articles, in patent licensing, in determining the need of keeping the patent in effect, in case of patenting abroad, in rendering patent services when the patent rights are violated, etc.
The tasks
of the legal status of a database, creation of status amendments and data.
a content
identifier
(a classification
status, (text) of the amendment.
In the course of system development, a major problem has been the creation of the data retrieval language.(l) The importance of this problem is due to
collection 193
194
A. P. Kolesnikov
a large variety of amendments of the legal status which differ considerably in their contents and depend on particularities of the patent legislation and practice of each country. The information-retrieval language (IRL) of the system includes the legal status amendment indexing tables and the bibliographic data language. The lexics of the IRL forms a set of bibliographic items and identifiers of these items (INID codes). The INID codes can be considered as semantic qualifiers of the 1RL lexic units. The IRL syntax of bibliographic data is determined by a fixed sequence of bibliographic items on the machine-readable medium. Before the indexing tables were developed, the practice of research on publishing information messages about the amendments of the legal status presented in the patent journals and amendment lists for countries to be processed for 2 or 3 years, the U.S.S.R. All-Union Patent Library specialist experience in creating a manual card file of the legal status, the amendment codes used by INPADOC in the Patent Rights Service (PRS) had been analysed and a question of using the WIPO ICIPLCIXIVI7 recommendations on indexing the headings of notices published in the Official Journals (further WIPO indexing tables) had been investigated. In the course of this study an experiment has been carried out on parallel indexing of the legal status amendments using both the WIPO codes and CMEA-country legal status codes. The latter have been developed within the framework of the International Patent Information System (IPIS). The above experiment has proved the practical uselessness of the recommendations on indexing of the headings of the notices published in the Official Journals for full indexing for all the types of amendments. The reasons are the inaccuracies in the design of the WIPO indexing tables, ambiguities in understanding indexing divisions and the presence of the non-informational divisions. This can be explained by the fact that they are intended to identify the divisions of the various levels, they do not reflect completely the contents of data encompassed in them and, therefore, are inexpedient for indexing in the computerized system. The analysis of the possibility of applying INPADOC codes has exposed the following.
the
and Yu. V. Sipapin
leaving a possibility to use (depending on a detail of the amendment) three or two position codes. These codes can be alphabetic, numeric or mixed ones. Some of the INPADOC indexing systems are the same as the national systems. For instance, to index the French legal status amendments, the ‘Listes’ index codes supplied by the French Patent Office are employed. As a rule, these codes are abbreviations of various types. When the patent document legal status amendment codes are indexed for the F.R.G. patent documents, a special indexing system is used. For example, the ‘Anderung in der Person, in Namen order in Wohnort des Anmelders’ (amendment in a person status, name or whereabouts of the applicant) amendment can be coded by three different codes depending on the part of the ‘Patentblatt’ journal where this amendment is published. If they are published in the first part, ‘Offengelegte Patentanmeldungen’ (Advertised applications), they are indexed with the code OGA. When they are published in the second part under the heading, ‘Bekanntgemachte Patentanmeldungen’ (published accepted applications), they are indexed with the code BGA. If they are published in the third part, ‘Erteilte Patente’ (issued patents), they are indexed with the code EGA. In all three cases, the first two letters of the code are the first letters of the journal part name while the last letter corresponds to the initial letter of the word Anmelder (applicant). The amendment, ‘Application Made for Amendment of Specification’, published in the Official Journal (Patents) of Great Britain is indexed with INPADOC code 429A. Here, the first digit of the code specifies that this amendment concerns a patent document issued according to the British Patent Law of 1949. the second and third letters of the code designate an article of this law, e.g. article 29 (specification amendments sanctioned by the controller). The studies conducted have proved that it is unreasonable to develop the unified indexing table for amendments of the legal status for all the countries, except for the CMEA-member countries. The amendment indexing table for the CMEA-member country patent documents is a list of two-position codes. The first position is numeric and serves to identify a generic heading, the second position is a Roman letter (the further code qualification). For instance:
The INPADOC PRSQ,“) processes amendments in the legal status of the patent documents originated in Austria, Switzerland, F.R.G., European Patent Office, France, Great Britain, The Netherlands, and WIPO. To index the amendments of the legal status, INPADOC uses four-position alpha-numeric codes
Expiration of a patent, 0 expiration of a patent on refusal, l expiration of a patent on duties unpaid, l expiration of a patent on its term expired,
1 1A 1B IC
Computerized
Cancellation, a complete cancellation of an author’s certificate, patent, l partial cancellation of an author’s certificate, patent,
Legal Status
3 3A 3B
To index amendments of the legal status of the F.R.G. patent documents, the indexing table including all the major amendments of the legal status of patents published in the F.R. G. OfJicial Journal, ‘Patentblatt’, is used. All the amendments fall into five divisions, each consisting of several subdivisions. Each amendment in the indexing table is coded by the four-position digital code. The first digit of the code, ‘8’, indicates that the F.R.G. patent document legal status amendments, published according to the Patent Law of 16 December 1980, are processed. The second digit of the code, ‘3’, indicates that amendments to the issued patents published in part 3, ‘Erteilte Patente’ (‘issued patents’), are processed. The third and fourth digits serve for further qualification of a concept within the generic heading. The indexing table of the U.S. patent status amendments contains 17 headings grouped in 10 divisions. All the amendments are coded by four-position alphabetic codes, an acronym for each type of an amendment or their combination. For instance: Disclaimer and DEdication, REquest for REexamination
field,
DIDE RERE
Each of 12 divisions of the indexing table for Switzerland is coded with alphabetic codes similar to the codes of the U.S. patent status amendments: LGschungen Nationler Patente (cancellation of national patents), Lijschungen Europaischer Patente (mit Wirkung fur die Schweiz und Liechtenstain) [cancellation of European patents in effect in Switzerland and Liechtenstein], It is worth noting that the tables are flexible IRL means.
developed
195
Processing
to the developed indexing tables, marking specific data items, keying data to magnetic tapes and input to the database. The database includes the following data items: a publication country code, an amendment source, a document number, a document type code, an amendment code according to the indexing table, a record status, the amendment contents (for specific amendment types). The information services prepared by the include monthly and annual indexes. The indexes are of three types: (1)
(2)
(3)
document number
__*
document number
-document
indexing code
type
type &amendment contents 4document number +
The first searches search by to obtain
document
amendment source
system annual
----+indexing code &indexing code
-amendment source
-document tYPe -amendment contents
two indexes are intended for manual by a document number, the third, for the indexing codes, and this can be used statistics.
The system also prepares a monthly cumulative magnetic tape containing data entered throughout the previous month. Data are ordered alphabetically by the publication country codes, the amendment type and document numbers. In the batch processing mode, the subscribers the system can search by two kinds of queries: (i) (ii)
by a document number, by a legal status amendment
indexing
of
code.
LONP
LOEP indexing
They can include some additions in the course of their usage without the need to change their overall structure. This is of a particular value in creating a retrospective database, since during a scope of from 17 to 20 years, patent legislation of a particular country can undergo some amendments which should be reflected in the indexing tables used. The process of handling data concerning the amendments of the legal status includes indexing of the notices contained in the Official Journal according
In addition to the search query responses, the system provides statistics about the contents of the ‘Legal status’ database (a full or short report) for a specified period of time, for one or a number of countries, for a specific type or all the types of amendments, for one type of the data source or for all the types. In local and remote access modes, the users can search by three types of queries: (i) (ii) (iii)
by a number of the patent by an amendment type, for statistics.c4)
system’s
document,
The system allows the user to access the indexing code tables as one of the help functions. The system is interactive and menu-driven. The screens of the video terminals in the and remote access modes are given below.
local
196
A. P. Kolesnikov
Types of screen display A. 1, Input; 2. 29 October 1987; 3, legal status; 4, time 00.2; 5, amendment type query; 6, publication country; 7, amendment code; 8. year, month, number of issue; 9, source type; 10, document number; 11, amendment contents; 12, an example of the search results in the ‘Legal status’ database by the amendment type. R. 1, Input; 2. 29 October 1987; 3, legal status: 4, time 10:16:54.7; 5, statistics on the amendment type; 6, publication country; 7, amendment code; 8. source type; 9. year, month of issue; 10, number of documents; 11, total; 12, example of statistics on the amendment type issued by the ‘Legal status’ database. c’. 1, Legal status; 2, amendment indexing table; 3, time 19:32:24.5; 4, text in the original language; 5, text in Russian; 6, amendment type; 7, act modifying the rights attached to the application for a patent or to a patent; 8. notification of public adjudication; 9, action on requesting the property rights; 10. restoration action; 11, cancelling a decision of transforming an application to a patent, to a certificate of the utility; 12. input; 13,2 November 1987; 14, a fragment of the indexing table presented on the terminal screen from the ‘Legal status’ database.
and Yu. V. Sipapin
The database is intended to be used by the readers of the U.S.S.R. All-Union Patent Library in the telecommunication mode. In addition, the ‘Legal status’ database is prepared for an access of the users via the National Data networks as well as within the framework of the International Scientific and Technical Information network for foreign customers via VNIIPAS-NTSAO. The main direction of further development of computerized processing of data about amendments of the patent document legal status is the extension of the retrospective collection of the database for countries which have already been processed for 16-20 years (the patent effective time), and the incorporation of data on amendments of patents of other countries that are of a maximum interest to the users. In perspective, the ‘Legal status’ database should be integrated with other databases of SPA ‘POISK’ which contain the more detailed items of the bibliographic description and, primarily, the IPC indexes and applicants.
References
-__
(1) A. I. Klimacheva, D. 1, 14 April 1988; 2, legal status; 3, time 16:25:45.8; 5, publication country; 6, document number; 7, source type; 8. document type; 9, year; 10, month; 11. journal part number; 12, amendment type; 13. amendment of person, name or whereabouts of applicant; 14. amendment contents; 15. example of search results in the ‘Legal status’ database by the document number.
L. V. Borodina and L. V. Konstanttnova. Problems of develonment of IRL for computerized handling of data about patent document legal status amendments. Computerized systems of patent information. M. VNIIPI
(3 (3)
(3)
1233120; 1984. 0. Auracher. INP.4DOC Patent Rights Service. International Symposium (Varna, 1YHO). Role of patent information in technology transfer. M. Vh’ZlPI, 1081. Patent Register Services on Microfiche, PRS. Technical description 311. INPITD/311IOIE. August, 1975). A. P. Kolcsnikov, Information about legal status of patent documents. Inverrrive Activify No. 5, lY86.