Digital cameras have a long product life cycle. Generally, sales decline once the product reaches maturity. However in Japan, the number of patent applications continues to grow even after the maturity stage. This indicates that there must be a number of useless patent applications. In Japan, companies tend to file patent applications without regard to the possible effects of the patent application on the companies productivity and profitability. In general, patent applications are filed to thwart competition and improve its bargaining power in cross licensing agreements. This study analyses the cumulative number of patent applications using correlation analysis and examination of the financial indicators of each company. More importantly, this paper makes a comparative study of the company's management of patent applications with the product life cycle of digital cameras.
Intellectual property systems have been introduced and used in many countries as a global standard. However its practical utilization is still not yet mature because of the lack of IP Strategy. Each enterprise has to define a unique IP strategy and be differentiated by other enterprises because the outside environment and internal resource are different. IP people have to have better understandings on strategy making process, which is fundamental to management field. In addition, IP strategy should include IP expertise based on IP laws and its regulations. In this paper, strategy making process is introduced for IP personnel together with a new proposal of an IP Strategy Menu which will combine IP strategy with management strategy making, for further improvement of IP activities for the growth of enterprise.
This research focuses on joint patent applications which have been produced from joint Research & Development (R&D) collaborations. There has been limited past research in this area. This research compares and analyses joint patent applications from Japan, US and Europe, clarifying the differences and features for successful joint R&D through statistical analysis between these regions. The most important factors are the field of technology, the situation of cooperation, the difference of patent law and its practice in each region, the conditions of the joint R&D agreement, and the strategy for joint R&D. A conclusion will be drawn: The more advantageous the regulation of coowned patents is, the greater the number of joint patent applications is filed in that country's patent office.
International patent classifications (IPCs) are assigned to patent documents; however, since the procedure for assigning classifications is manually done by the patent examiner, it takes a lot of time and effort to select some IPCs from about 70,000 IPCs. Hence, some research has been conducted on patent classification with machine learning. However, patent documents are very voluminous, and learning with all the claims (the part describing the content of the patent) as input would run out of the necessary memory. Therefore, most of the existing methods learn by excluding some information, such as using only the first claim as input. In this study, we propose a model that considers the contents of all claims by extracting important information for input. We also propose a new decoder that considers the hierarchical structure of the IPC. Finally, we evaluate the model using an evaluation index that assumes the actual use of IPC selection for patent documents.
According to recent surveys, there exist numerous patent applications in countries, such as Japan and the USA. Out of the total granted patents, there are so many patents which are not utilised on the product and its market. In this research, we analysed the different levels of inventive step or non-obviousness especially focusing on the difference of the ratio of office actions made by EPO and JPO between European enterprises and Japanese enterprises whether the office actions include the prior arts related to the said invention filed as a patent application. Under the current patent law, all patents granted have the same level of protection. Considering the basicness or improvementness of patents, it is proposed based on this research to distinguish the level of inventive step or non-obviousness together with the level of protection, which gives big impact on legal structures together with how the patent law should be amended in the future.
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