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News on patent, trademark and design databases on the Internet
World Patent Information 29 (2007) 270–271 www.elsevier.com/locate/worpatin
News on patent, trademark and design databases on the Internet Canada has expanded its Canadian Copyrights Database by adding a field for assignors of copyright. The site is for newly registered or expunged copyrights since 1991. The site is at. http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/app/copo/copyrights/displaySearch.do?language=eng. Besides Canada, the United States and Australia have similar databases. The idea is for registering books, films, and the like. The United Kingdom treats all copyrighted works as an automatic right without the need to register and pay renewal fees. Those databases can be found (among others) at http://www.bl.uk/collections/patents/ othlink3.html#property on the British Library website. For India, there is now an unofficial database at http:// india.bigpatents.org/. There is a single search box but in addition the contents can be browsed by applicant, as can newly issued or applications made open to inspection. The ‘‘newly issued’’ patents I browsed through gave, in no apparent order, specifications with publication dates between August 2005 and December 2006 (this was in April 2007). Title and applicant name data is also given, plus a reference to the page in the gazette. The data has been collected from the gazette for January 2005 onwards – the same coverage, I see, as Thomson’s Derwent WPIL database. India is becoming so important that it would be excellent to see more being done for their intellectual property information. Italy has made available two online listings of supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) at http:// www.uibm.gov.it/bollettini.asp. These are for extending protection for patented pharmaceuticals or plant protection products that awaited permission for use from the authorities. They both list October to December 2006 entries. The first is for CCP, Certificati Complementari di Protezione, for pharmaceuticals, and the second is for CCPF, Certificati Complementari di Protezione Fitosanitari, for plant protection products. The Philippines has launched a Patent Online Search System at http://www.ipophil.gov.ph/PatSearch. This is a database for inventions (I), utility models (U) and designs (D). Drawings and abstracts are given for inventions and many utility models, and there are drawings for the designs. They have also put their gazette online at http:// www.ipophil.gov.ph/PatGazette. It contains bibliographical details of inventions, utility models and designs from the 20 November 2006. It seems to have similar if not identical drawings and abstracts. doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2007.04.005
Portugal has separate databases for inventions, trade marks, and status at http://www.inpi.pt/irj/portal/anonymous (see ‘‘Pesquisas online’’). It is necessary to enter characters from a displayed bitmap to run a search. Bibliographic details only are given for the inventions, but it does go back to the 1970s. The designs have images. Portugal’s gazette, the Boletim da propriedade industrial, is also available, from 2004. This includes drawings and abstracts for patents and utility models in separate numerical sequences, and drawings of designs in numerical order. There are also advertised trade marks and SPC data. Slovenia has launched a service for SPCs. This is a database on applications and for granted SPCs. The URL is http://www2.uil-sipo.si/Squ031.stm. For the United States, there are two private efforts. The first is PatentMonkey at http://www.patentmonkey.com/. This adds to the many sites which offer searching within American utility patents, on this occasion grants only from August 1975 onwards. You can search the full text (but cannot truncate). There is also status data (derived solely from an algorithm), and you pay to download copies. This is taken from a fuller account on Mike White’s blog ‘‘The Patent Librarian’s Notebook’’ at http://patentlibrarian. blogspot.com/, as I only got a blank screen when I tried to access the site. Apparently PatentMonkey comes from the idea that if an infinite number of monkeys typed away they would eventually reproduce all of Thomas Edison’s one thousand plus patents. There is also WikiPatentsÔ Community Patent Review at http://www.wikipatents.com/. The idea is that people can contribute thoughts about inventions: are they important, how much money are they likely to make, and so on. It seems open to manipulation. For example, a single (anonymous) person voted in the case of one invention that there were no commercial alternatives to it. This may be true, but should one trust that vote? More useful, I suspect, is the fact that the US Patent and Trademark Office has announced that it wants to launch its own wiki site where users will be invited to submit relevant prior art. This sounds useful for awkward technical areas like software where there is relatively little patent prior art. The fact, though, that the United States is a first to invent country (rather than first to file) may make identifying all the relevant prior art tricky. On this, The Washington Post (5 March) reports ‘‘The pilot project will start this Spring and feature a community
News on patent, trademark and design databases / World Patent Information 29 (2007) 270–271
rating system that prioritizes the most respected comments. During the pilot phase of the project about 250 software design applications will be posted on the Web site since examiners have an especially difficult time finding documentation for them. Any user can post information relating to patent proposals, but a ‘‘reputation system’’ will be put in place to rank submitted materials and measure the expertise of contributors.’’ Vietnam has a trade mark database at http:// www.noip.gov.vn/noip/ipright.nsf/frmSearchIPRight?Open Form&IP_Type=Trademark&Language=English. This is such a long URL that users may prefer the shortened version provided to me by Bigdig of http://digbig.com/ 4sehw. The site is in Vietnamese. I tried asking for Sony and got 44 hits for marks by the company, most of which were Western character trade marks.
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Finally, WIPO has put its Romarin database of the Madrid Agreement trade marks up for free at http:// www.wipo.int/romarin/. It is said to be superior to WIPO’s other database of the same material, Madrid Express at http://www.wipo.int/ipdl/en/search/madrid/search-struct. jsp. This superiority is presumably in the result data, where detailed status data such as on renewals is available. As usual these links will be put up on the British Library’s patents web site, www.bl.uk/patents. Stephen van Dulken The British Library, Science, Technology and Innovation, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, UK E-mail address: [email protected]
News on patent, trademark and design databases on the Internet Canada has expanded its Canadian Copyrights Database by adding a field for assignors of copyright. The site is for newly registered or expunged copyrights since 1991. The site is at. http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/app/copo/copyrights/displaySearch.do?language=eng. Besides Canada, the United States and Australia have similar databases. The idea is for registering books, films, and the like. The United Kingdom treats all copyrighted works as an automatic right without the need to register and pay renewal fees. Those databases can be found (among others) at http://www.bl.uk/collections/patents/ othlink3.html#property on the British Library website. For India, there is now an unofficial database at http:// india.bigpatents.org/. There is a single search box but in addition the contents can be browsed by applicant, as can newly issued or applications made open to inspection. The ‘‘newly issued’’ patents I browsed through gave, in no apparent order, specifications with publication dates between August 2005 and December 2006 (this was in April 2007). Title and applicant name data is also given, plus a reference to the page in the gazette. The data has been collected from the gazette for January 2005 onwards – the same coverage, I see, as Thomson’s Derwent WPIL database. India is becoming so important that it would be excellent to see more being done for their intellectual property information. Italy has made available two online listings of supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) at http:// www.uibm.gov.it/bollettini.asp. These are for extending protection for patented pharmaceuticals or plant protection products that awaited permission for use from the authorities. They both list October to December 2006 entries. The first is for CCP, Certificati Complementari di Protezione, for pharmaceuticals, and the second is for CCPF, Certificati Complementari di Protezione Fitosanitari, for plant protection products. The Philippines has launched a Patent Online Search System at http://www.ipophil.gov.ph/PatSearch. This is a database for inventions (I), utility models (U) and designs (D). Drawings and abstracts are given for inventions and many utility models, and there are drawings for the designs. They have also put their gazette online at http:// www.ipophil.gov.ph/PatGazette. It contains bibliographical details of inventions, utility models and designs from the 20 November 2006. It seems to have similar if not identical drawings and abstracts. doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2007.04.005
Portugal has separate databases for inventions, trade marks, and status at http://www.inpi.pt/irj/portal/anonymous (see ‘‘Pesquisas online’’). It is necessary to enter characters from a displayed bitmap to run a search. Bibliographic details only are given for the inventions, but it does go back to the 1970s. The designs have images. Portugal’s gazette, the Boletim da propriedade industrial, is also available, from 2004. This includes drawings and abstracts for patents and utility models in separate numerical sequences, and drawings of designs in numerical order. There are also advertised trade marks and SPC data. Slovenia has launched a service for SPCs. This is a database on applications and for granted SPCs. The URL is http://www2.uil-sipo.si/Squ031.stm. For the United States, there are two private efforts. The first is PatentMonkey at http://www.patentmonkey.com/. This adds to the many sites which offer searching within American utility patents, on this occasion grants only from August 1975 onwards. You can search the full text (but cannot truncate). There is also status data (derived solely from an algorithm), and you pay to download copies. This is taken from a fuller account on Mike White’s blog ‘‘The Patent Librarian’s Notebook’’ at http://patentlibrarian. blogspot.com/, as I only got a blank screen when I tried to access the site. Apparently PatentMonkey comes from the idea that if an infinite number of monkeys typed away they would eventually reproduce all of Thomas Edison’s one thousand plus patents. There is also WikiPatentsÔ Community Patent Review at http://www.wikipatents.com/. The idea is that people can contribute thoughts about inventions: are they important, how much money are they likely to make, and so on. It seems open to manipulation. For example, a single (anonymous) person voted in the case of one invention that there were no commercial alternatives to it. This may be true, but should one trust that vote? More useful, I suspect, is the fact that the US Patent and Trademark Office has announced that it wants to launch its own wiki site where users will be invited to submit relevant prior art. This sounds useful for awkward technical areas like software where there is relatively little patent prior art. The fact, though, that the United States is a first to invent country (rather than first to file) may make identifying all the relevant prior art tricky. On this, The Washington Post (5 March) reports ‘‘The pilot project will start this Spring and feature a community
News on patent, trademark and design databases / World Patent Information 29 (2007) 270–271
rating system that prioritizes the most respected comments. During the pilot phase of the project about 250 software design applications will be posted on the Web site since examiners have an especially difficult time finding documentation for them. Any user can post information relating to patent proposals, but a ‘‘reputation system’’ will be put in place to rank submitted materials and measure the expertise of contributors.’’ Vietnam has a trade mark database at http:// www.noip.gov.vn/noip/ipright.nsf/frmSearchIPRight?Open Form&IP_Type=Trademark&Language=English. This is such a long URL that users may prefer the shortened version provided to me by Bigdig of http://digbig.com/ 4sehw. The site is in Vietnamese. I tried asking for Sony and got 44 hits for marks by the company, most of which were Western character trade marks.
271
Finally, WIPO has put its Romarin database of the Madrid Agreement trade marks up for free at http:// www.wipo.int/romarin/. It is said to be superior to WIPO’s other database of the same material, Madrid Express at http://www.wipo.int/ipdl/en/search/madrid/search-struct. jsp. This superiority is presumably in the result data, where detailed status data such as on renewals is available. As usual these links will be put up on the British Library’s patents web site, www.bl.uk/patents. Stephen van Dulken The British Library, Science, Technology and Innovation, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, UK E-mail address: [email protected]