Talk:Patent search tools meeting

Extra notes by Reshma

• European patent examiners tend to include a smaller number of references as prior art in their patents. Examiners try to use the minimum number of references to cover the prior art. In Europe, it is generally believed that the standard for issuing patents is higher in Europe than in the U.S. ... i.e. that it is harder to get patents in Europe than in the U.S. This has been true of some of the stem cell patents.
• European patent office register (in US its called PAIR)
  • Can learn some about whether applications have lapsed or not, gives detailed breakdown

• [1] - joshua sarnof(?) at washU, would be good to talk to about prior art, how to file opposition, etc.
• 70K classification codes, Paul has culled list for ones that are relevant to biotech. The classification codes are useful for automatically picking out syn bio patents, for instance.
• WIPO is the standard setter for a lot of this stuff. They have a patent classification system, and there are concordances between the codes across EU, US, and WIPO.
• US system is somewhat automated in how documents are classified. What happened in nanotech was that eventually the whole world starts using the word "nano" because it's exciting, so keyword searches become less useful. So EU introduced a nanotech classifier (Y01N), to separate the wheat from the chaff. Paul suggests that tags be specified genomics, synthetic biology, etc...
  • you can search the european classification itself, e.g. text search to find out the classification codes that might be useful.

Patent Lens is a very useful patent search tool. It also includes BLAST searching of DNA and protein sequences that show up in patents.