The Japan Patent Office had never given itself a patent . . . until now. It awarded itself a patent for an invention by seven of its own examiners, who had programming skills, a patent for a multilingual patent searching program they developed for the JPO’s use in its online patent search platform J-PlatPat.
The patent, No. 6691280 (application No. 2020-8423), was registered on April 14, 2020 after a January 22, 2020 filing and Allowance on March 10. The patent covers claims for a system to conduct searches across multiple national patent offices’ databases. The program uses AI to search for the appropriate classes even across the diverse classification systems and languages used by the world’s patent offices. The JPO also filed for trademark protection of the name of the system, “ADPAS” (an abbreviation of Advanced Patent Search) in Roman letters and Japanese kana, in summer of 2019.[1,2]
The JPO employees listed as the inventors for the patent are JPO examiners who have skill in programming. One of the inventors was interviewed and said that as far as their search shows, the JPO had never registered a patent to itself before. He also emphasized that the examination was standard and fair.[1]
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Taro Yaguchi
Sources
[1] Bengo4.com News. “特許庁、初めて特許を取得「公正に審査しました」…プログラムできる審査官が発明 [JPO acquires its first patent; “We examined fairly”; examiners who could program invented].” https://www.bengo4.com/c_23/n_11198/ May 12, 2020. Accessed May 19, 2020.
[2] Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan. “特許庁が特許文献検索システムに関する特許権を取得しました [The JPO acquired patent rights to a patent document search system].” https://www.meti.go.jp/press/2020/05/20200511001/20200511001.html May 11, 2020. Accessed May 19, 2020.
