Prior art is the info that has been created readily available to the public in any form ahead of a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality. If an invention has been disclosed in public domains, a patent on that invention is not valid. Thus, patent search and non-patent literature search are usually performed prior to filling a patent or before / for the duration of a patent litigation.
Japanese patents are prime source of prior art search. Japan is ranked No.1 country in the number of patent applications filed annually. In 2009, there are about 400,00 patent applications filed in Japan (JPO), which is about 20% of the total patent applications filed worldwide, the highest number in all countries.
As a comparison, there are about 370,000 and 178,600 patent applications filed annually in the USPTO and EPO respectively.
Japanese patents are the richest sources of prior art in the globe, with significantly more than 50 millions searchable patent and trademark documents, over 200 millions pages, stored at the JPO database. As a comparison, USPTO has stored about ten millions of searchable documents which includes patents and trademarks.
Applications filed in Japan are published (laid open) 18 months soon after the filling or priority date regardless of the examination. The invention described in the published application turn into a prior art as of this disclosure.
Even though they can be tricky to search, Japanese sources are incredibly important taking into consideration they are the richest prior art sources in the globe and Japan is one of the top 3 economies with the most advanced technologies in many fields.
No comments:
Post a Comment