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20 November 2020PatentsJames Nurton

How AI Can Transform IP Offices

If you visited the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) exhibition booth at INTA’s Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts in May 2019, you might remember seeing a demonstration of the new image search tool in the Global Brand Database (GBD), which was launched just a month before.

Using machine learning, GBD’s image search tool identifies concepts, such as a dog or a tree, within an image, and then finds similar marks that are already registered. The search results are then presented in order of their similarity to the original image.

Now, 18 months later, the tool is being used throughout the global trademark community. The biggest demand has been from China, which accounted for about 35 percent of users in the first year.

“There are a lot of recurring users; people start to use it and keep on,” said Christophe Mazenc, WIPO’s Director of the Global Databases Division.

He said the image search tool covers all the countries in the GBD (55 at present), which includes over 22 million images.

It is also being used in combination with other search tools, such as the Vienna Classification and Nice Classification. One of the advantages is that the GBD’s image search can be used with any combination of search criteria.

What AI Offers

The GBD’s image search tool is just one example of how intellectual property offices (IPOs) worldwide are investing in digital technology to provide more information and services to users, improve efficiency, and make greater use of their data collections.

Increasingly, this technology involves some form of artificial intelligence (AI).

“Trademark offices worldwide are engaging with innovators in AI to promote the predictability and reliability of IP rights relating to AI technology,” according to Julie Katz, Owner at Katz Group LLC (US).

A report filed by INTA’s Emerging Issues Committee in October 2019, “Use of AI by IP Registries,” revealed that most of the registries consulted for the report were already in the early stages of adopting AI solutions.

The report suggested that AI is likely to increase the confidence that trademark professionals have in a trademark office, resulting in an improvement in the relationship between IPOs and their stakeholders.

It predicted: “Consequently, just as the public welcomes the development of a market for any highly coveted, useful new item, so too will the public be impacted positively by, and adapt favorably to, the new technology.”

AI tools already launched or under development in the IPO sphere include:

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