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November 2024


BPIP 53rd Annual Meeting in 2024.


For the first time in some years, I was able to attend the BPIP Annual Meeting in person! It was great to have time to engage with treasured colleagues, and to meet new people. The BPIP meeting continues in a hybrid format, and was this year hosted by Reckitt in Slough. The meeting follows the usual format with updates within the group, and then formal (technical) presentations and short discussions following. Here I share some personal highlights from the technical talks, starting with Stephen Adam’s ‘ patents I have known’. Stephen shared insights from his forty-year career, and in so doing reminded us of the importance (and country specific nature) of Kind Codes, that many parties participate in any patent application. Inventors and applicants may reside in different organisations, with aims that are unlikely to be totally aligned. Depending on subject area, never overlook Designs in your ‘Patent’ (patentability, invalidity, FTO) search strategy. Next up was a talk from James Rudman and Mark Ede both of GSK on 'Quality of structure indexing in PubChem.’ This talk came from analysis conducted by the PDG Chemistry Task Force since 2023 after the group became aware of errors and inconsistencies in PubChem. Their aim was to seek improvements within PubChem to improve the accuracy of this valuable resource. PubChem is hosted by the US NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) along with PubMed and a suite of other databases. PubChem indexes patents, and is widely used by patent examiners, and in legal proceedings, so it is important that the entries are correct. The team have engaged in discussions with the NCBI, and content providers (depositors) regarding adding quality checks. We look forward to an update in 2025. Chris Baker from ClearViewIP presented on a subject which has been on everyone’s radar recently – ‘Patent Mining with LLMs: Game-Changer or Gimmick?’ Should we as patent information professionals be using the latest generation of AI tools (LLMs) in our daily work? And if so, how to

choose the best approach? Chris gave some examples from the work at ClearView, comparing GPT-4o and OpenAI concluding that AI should be a tool not a decision maker, that we take time to choose the best AI tool or the task (e.g. classifier, drafter, retriever, summarizer).

July 2024


World Patent Information (WPI) Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) meeting.


An interesting experience to attend the WPI EAB meeting as a board member, after stepping down as Editor in Chief after almost ten years! Good to catch up with colleagues for some discussions on IP management and IP information related topics with this group of experts from IP Offices, academia and industry from around the world. Topics discussed ranged from deep learning for patents, IP and innovation management in the 21st century, the expanding patent information ecosystem.  Good luck to Amy Trappey and her new team! 


June 2024

Jane enjoyed attending the 7th PatentSight+ Summit in June for a full day of discussions on IP strategy and sharing tips on providing (patent) information for evidence based decision making.
2024 PatentSight+ Summit | LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions (lexisnexisip.com)



March 2024


Unitary Patent information in different databases.


A major change took place in Europe with implications for those seeking information on patents and their legal status. In June 2023, the Unitary Patent system began, and applicants have the choice for seven years to use the unitary patent, and have their granted European Patent validated in the 17 EU states which are participating, or to opt-out and continue with validating their European patent in the states of their choice. As IP professionals we need to know how to find and to understand this legal status information. Jane was honoured to deliver a talk on this topic at the WON Meeting on 28 March 2024, in Utrecht, NL.

The talk, and all the other fascinating presentations are available to WON members at https://won-nl.org/ 


Or contact Jane@extractinfo.info for more information.

The 9th ‘Conversation on IP and Frontier Technologies’


On March 13 and 14 WIPO held its 9th ‘Conversation on IP and Frontier Technologies’  The subject this time was ‘Training the Machines – Bytes, Rights and the Copyright Conundrum". Machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been in use in the patent information field for many years, not least for the development of machine translations of the bulk collections of full text patent documents which patent professionals search every day. The generative AI systems which are now being developed required even more content, - images as well as text. The emergence of ChatGPT for general usage has created huge interest and awareness of the opportunities and threats of AI technologies. The rights of creators need to be reconciled with the needs of AI Tools developers. People who use Flickr and people who use Reddit were examples provided of inadvertent content creators who were not all happy to find their work used as fodder for the machine. The Actors and Writers strikes in the US is another example, where human content creators became concerned over their potential loss of rights and income due to use of, and ownership of AI -generated content in their industries.
Can Copyright law as well as contract law help here ?
The other question was also discussed – can AI be an inventor or creator of IPRs? .
Interestingly, photography provided a historic example. A camera (a machine) is used to create an artistic work. A photographer manipulates the camera, chooses the desired image, and since 1885 in the US has been recognised as the IPR holder, but not until 1965 in Germany. Copyright laws are far from harmonised. So, whilst humans are guiding AI, we have clear precedent on the ownership / inventorship question. AI developers need access to data, and not just historic data, if the AI is to keep up to date as a ‘skilled person knowledgeable in the state of the art’ would.
But that access must surely acknowledge and benefit the creators and owners of the original data?
Recordings and the programmes for this and earlier conversations can be found at:
https://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/frontier_technologies/frontier_conversation.html


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