China Launches International Patent Database

Photo Danny Friedmann
Raise the flag, 
there is reason for celebration

China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) has launched a new patent search, see here.
The search system also offers machine translation: China Patent Machine Translation (CPMT).

"The system has more than 80 million abstracts of patent-related documents, and more than 70 million full-text documents and charts, collected from nearly 100 countries, regions and organizations." Read the article about it in the China Daily here.

Good news if you want to see which patents are out there and what quality they have.

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Patents in China: Quantity Obsessed Quality Challenged

Time for quality patents
Photo: Danny Friedmann

Now we are all following Ericsson sueing ZTE for patent infringement in Germany, UK and Italy, read here. Followed of course by ZTE trying to invalidate Ericsson's patent at China's Patent Re-examination Board, read here, because of an alleged lack of novelty, inventiveness or usefulness. In other words: lack of quality.

Wan Gang 万钢 minister of Science and Technology, was saying some remarkable things about innovation that might bode not too well for patent quality, when he was interviewed during a press conference held by the State Council Information Office, April 2 about China's scientific and technological research as outlined in the 12th Five-Year Plan.

Minister Wan was quoted by the Global Times saying that China's budget for research and experiment across the country should account for 2.2 percent of GDP. And that the number of patent-holders per 10,000 people should be the second benchmark.

One can question the usefulness of the latter benchmark. What kind of patents are meant, utility patents which are for incremental innovations, design-patents or invention patents? Read more about utility patent here. Quantity does not say much about the quality of patents. And patents are preoccupied with usefulness (article 22 Patent Law 2008), and scientific discoveries (article 25.1 Patent Law 2008) are excluded of getting a patent. while it could be the case that fundamental research is most fruitful in the longer run.

Read the interview at Global Times here.

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Incremental Pharmaceutical Inventions in China and India: "No Need to Reinvent the Wheel"

For those who missed it, in 2008, the Intellectual Property Association of Japan (IPAJ) published an interesting article by Parama Sinha Palit and Bhaskar Bhattacharya called 'Does Intellectual Property Laws in India and China Encourage Innovation'. Messrs Palit and Bhattacharya, both senior associate with Corporate Law Group are advocates of the patentability of incremental, cumulative or adaptive pharmaceutical inventions. They opine that China is doing a much better job than India in this respect. India seems to discourage incremental inventions, while China has utility (model)-patents for these kind of inventions.

"It has been rightly pointed out that not recognizing incremental innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is like asking medical researchers to reinvent the wheel."

Read their IPAJ article here.

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Almost One Million Patent Applications in China in 2009

China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) reports the following statistics:

• 976,686 patent applications (up 17.9%)
• 877,611 domestic (89.9% and up 22.4%)
• 99,075 from abroad (10.1%, down 10.9%)

• 229,096 invention-patents (up 17.7%)
• 308,861 utility model-patents (up 37.9%)
• 339,654 design-patents (up 13.7%)

• 581,992 granted patents (up 41.2%)
• 501,786 patent granted to domestic filers (86.2%, up 42.4%)
• 80,206 patents granted to foreign filers (13.8%, up 34.6%)

SIPO writes that: "First, patent applications maintained steady and relatively fast growth; Second, structure of domestic patent applications and grants was significantly optimized; Third, the volume of patent grants increased rapidly and patent examination capacity was palpably enhanced." Read here.

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Patent Quality in China: "You could patent a wheel"

Ms Patti Waldmeir wrote a great article for the Financial Times about Chinese patents 'The value of branding becomes patent', read here.

On the positive side Ms Waldmeir noticed that China is the country where most companies are filing for patents in China. However, she noticed that most patents were utility patents (not really as inventive as invention patents and protected for 10 years instead of 20 years) the quality is substandard. She quoted mr Elliot Papageorgiou of Rouse & Co who said euphemistically that the enforcement of patent infringements has room for improvements.

"Legal experts in China say these figures reflect a concerted government campaign to persuade Chinese companies to protect their intellectual property by law: the elevated motorway that runs through Shanghai recently sported billboards extolling the virtues of IP protection and some Chinese companies get government subsidies to cover patent application costs, a factor that artificially inflates the number of filings."

Read ms Waldmeir's article here.

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