Patent Librarian's Notebook

Plant patents don’t usually get much attention in the news, so I was delighted to see a short well-written article on plant patents in the June 2007 issue of Lee Valley & Veritas gardening newsletter. Lee Valley & Veritas is a gardening and woodworking tool retailer in Canada.

In 2006 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued approximately 1,150 plant patents with 432 (38%) awarded to U.S. inventors. The next highest total was the Netherlands with 212 (19%) plant patents. Five plant patents were awarded to Canadian inventors in 2006.

Italian designer Gianfranco Ferre died yesterday from an apparent massive brain hemorrhage. He was 62. He achieved international fame during his career at Christian Dior, where he was top designer from 1989-1996. Fashion designers work in the space between art and invention, and are not known for filing patent applications. Ferre was no exception. He received only three US design patents for a jewelry chain (D343,372), wristwatch (D294,919) and a “twin-shared pocket for a garment” (D294,651). Of course, these represent just a tiny part of his vast portfolio. His contemporaries Donantello Versace and Giorgio Armani hold 14 and 5 US design patents, respectively. I’ve always been curious why fashion designers such as Ferre, Armani and Versace even bother with patents in the first place. Is it their decision or their employers?

Two recent studies suggest that patents have a key role to play in raising state per capita incomes and overcoming persistent poverty. A working paper published almost a year ago by two staffers of the Federal Bank of Cleveland and professor Scott Shane of Case Western University, suggests that patents and high school/university graduation rates are the most important determinants of per state capita income. A more recent study by researchers at the Univ. of Kentucky’s Center for Business and Economic Research reaffirmed the Case Western’s findings. (Reported in the SSTI Weekly Digest.)

Last night’s Final Jeopardy! answer was “Shunpei Yamazaki”, an inventor who holds more than 3,200 patents, a world record.

According to the USPTO web site, Yamazaki has 1,688 issued U.S. patents and 1,261 published applications. A search in Patent Lens, a non-profit patent database service, retrieved 3,226 U.S., European and international patent documents credited to Yamazaki. The EPO’s esp@cenet system, which contains more than 60 million patent documents from 70+ countries, records 7,285 patents and published applications for Yamazaki. In contrast, Thomas Edison, America’s most prolific inventor, rec’d some 1,100 U.S. patents during his lifetime.

Patent Lens, a public patent database containing more than 6 million US, EP and WO patent documents, now allows searchers to limit searches by the predicted expiry date for granted US patents. The date is displayed in the body of the record.

Searchers should note that the predicted expiry date is calculated and does not take into account terminal disclaimers, term extensions or adjustments.

Patent Lens is operated as a “public good global resource for increasing patent transparency” by Cambia, an independent, non-profit scientific research institute located in Canberra Australia.

This week the WIPO formally announced the newest feature in its PatentScope database: the ability to display search results in graphic format. The tool has been available in beta version for several months.

The tool converts search results into four graphic charts: 1) year of publication, 2) country of publication, 3) applicant name (first named) and 4) IPC subclass. This is the first public patent database that (to the best of my knowledge) has a search results graphical display capability.