EPO looks East with partnering initiatives
The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced machine translation of patents to and from Japanese, the day after it signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO).
Announcing the launch of the Japanese-English component of Patent Translate, the EPO’s automatic translation service, office president Benoît Battistelli said: “Japanese is one of the leading languages of technology, and a lot of scientific knowledge, or what we call ‘prior art’, resides in Japanese patents and patent documents, which are now freely available in English to engineers, inventors and scientists around the world. This will further strengthen the competitiveness of European businesses, who will now be able to better target their R&D work by searching Japanese patent documents, while further improving the substance of their patent applications.”
Japan Patent Office (JPO) commissioner Hiroyuki Fukano echoed Battistelli’s sentiments, adding: “With the advances being made in the globalisation of intellectual property, the language barrier has been a challenging and longstanding issue. Going forward, the JPO is determined make a solid contribution to providing significant benefits to users in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere around the world through global cooperation such as mutual collaboration between the EPO and the JPO.”
Stefan Eck, partner at Klaka in Germany, said the new database and translation tool is another milestone in accessing prior art for European companies.
“The tool provides access to technical know-how concealed by language barriers so far and will contribute to drive innovation of European businesses,” he added. “On a legal level it somehow raises the bar for patent applications as prior art might be detected that would have not been found before. At the same time it reduces the risk that prior art might be presented after the patent has been granted and that the patent is invalidated in a subsequent proceeding and thus increases legal certainty for European patent owners.”
The EPO and SIPO’s memorandum of understanding, announced on Tuesday, provides for enhanced cooperation over classifying patents.
From 2014, SIPO has agreed to start classifying newly published invention patent applications in some technical fields in the cooperative patent classification (CPC), and in all technical areas from 2016. The CPC has been used by the EPO and the US Patent and Trademark Office since the start of this year.
The EPO will help train Chinese examiners in advance of the adoption of the new system.
“With the SIPO introducing the CPC as its internal classification scheme alongside the International Patent Classification, access to Chinese patent documentation will be dramatically improved. Using classification symbols supports our endeavour to overcome the remaining language barriers,” said Battistelli.
“It is a fantastic accomplishment in terms of harmonisation of our patent systems and the recognition of the CPC as a global system which can be used by many patent offices around the world,” he added.
Tian Lipu, commissioner of SIPO, said: “The introduction of the CPC at SIPO to classify Chinese patent documents is another significant achievement to promote the bilateral cooperation between the two offices. The number of Chinese invention patent applications ranked first in the world consecutively in 2011 and 2012 ... Classifying Chinese patent documents into the CPC will undoubtedly improve the search efficiency of these documents by the examiners of various patent offices worldwide, and help these documents better serve global users as well.”
