TPN Europe 2018: When social media upends patent applications
A patent attorney at chemicals and sustainable technologies company Johnson Matthey has told an industry conference how “social media is one of my pet hates”.
Angela King explained that while in a previous role at patent attorney firm Murgitroyd, the European Patent Office and the UK Intellectual Property Office cited social media against clients’ patent applications.
King was speaking at the Technology Patent Network (TPN) Europe conference in London yesterday, June 21.
In the first instance, a company called NB Jewellery applied to patent a clasp on the back of a jewellery item so that pendants on a necklace could be easily interchanged.
But the IPO raised an objection based on the applicant having released a picture of the jewellery on its Twitter feed before the date of the application. Further posts indicated that the jewellery had been donated to charity and was therefore available to the public.
After joking about her horror because “I had never used Twitter before”, King said the instance showed the inventor’s lack of understanding in releasing the picture publicly before the application had been filed. NB Jewellery later abandoned the application.
The second case involved a third-party video blog (vlog) by a “US influencer in the craft field” whose online tutorials were cited against a patent application, King explained.
The patent, filed by SC Johnson, related to a plastic moulded product into which melted wax would be poured before cooling, and the design “was such that solid wax would be easy to get out”.
Although the vlogger makes candle products, “we would never think to look at vlogs”, King said, adding that SC Johnson was forced to amend the claims so that they were much narrower in scope.
She said social media can be “really annoying” as “you would never think to look” at it as a source of prior art.
King added that the issue of social media disclosures from within a company can be hard to control, despite the IP training on offer, and asked her fellow panellists whether they had any tips on how to prevent information being unwittingly leaked outside the company.
Anna Maria Lagerqvist Gahm, senior IP counsel at Volvo Car Group, who had spoken earlier about IP and the internet of things, stressed that education is key.
Adam Pilcher, IP attorney at Vodafone Group Services, added that social media can actually provide a “great opportunity” to enable collaboration within a company, to “get the message out there” and promote IP triumphs.
He added that these efforts “can get engineers thinking about IP and reduce the tendency to undervalue their ideas or keep them to themselves”.
TPN Europe was hosted by World IP Review.
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