Michael Blackman

Provision of patent information: a national patent office perspective

This article is based on a lecture delivered at the International Chemical Information Conference at Annecy, France in October 1994. It complemented lectures provided by the European Patent Office (EPO) in recent years at this conference.(1) The changes that have taken place regionally and nationally over the last 15 years in the wake of the establishment of the EPO are outlined, such as the reduced input to national offices and their increased role as information providers of both patent and trade mark information. As an example of these changes, the effects on the UK Patent Office (UKPO) and the range of services now provided are described in some detail. Extracts from the UKPOs awareness campaign on intellectual property and patent information are provided. Patent information and search services provided by other organisations in the United Kingdom are also described.

The Smart way for patent information to help small firms

This article explores the value of patent information as a crucial factor in the assessment of government awards in the UK to technically innovative small firms. The Smart scheme provides a substantial boost to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Some of this help is financial, but they also get help in other ways, for example through the publicity and marketing opportunities the winning of an award creates. Also in many cases, they get the benefit of the patent search that the UK Patent Office carries out as a crucial part of the assessment of most applications. The awards can be used in a variety of ways to enhance the chances of a business getting their project completed and the corresponding product successfully launched into the marketplace. This embraces, inter alia, many of the costs of seeking protection for, and enforcement of, their intellectual property rights (IPR).

Patent specifications no. 2002

Abstract Presented here are the results of some ‘topical’ research for the year 2002––a selection of the patent specifications numbered 2002. It provides a snapshot of the technologies, the inventors and the illustrations of their inventions, from around the world and spanning more than 200 years, from 1794 to 2002. The value of both traditional, paper-based collections and current Internet-based resources in this context is underlined. Over 60 specifications, from some 30 countries and organizations are covered including US, GB, DE, RU, CH, PL, GR, OA, EP, WO, BR, JP, CN, SK and LT.

Patent information: an historical perspective

An historical survey of one specific technical field, as illustrated in patent disclosures, is presented. The field is umbrellas, parasols and walking sticks, from the first British patent of 1780 up to the present day, using classified abridgements in bound volumes of hard copy until the mid 1970s and online databases thereafter. More detailed analyses of the last 20 years are provided. Unlike many recent rapidly developing fields, this field has changed relatively little over two centuries; annual inputs are comparable since the middle 1800s, while many similar solutions to recurrent problems resurface periodically. Nevertheless, discernible commercially and technically significant improvements occur throughout this period, as well as many short-lived tangential developments. Some reasons for this pattern are suggested.

In times of yore: 1705

Abstract Extracts of a GB patent of 1705 are provided and set in the context of the lengthy, formal and very expensive procedure for obtaining patent rights at this time.