21st Century Innovation Systems for Japan and the United States Lessons from a Decade of Change: Report of a Symposium (2009) / Chapter Skim
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Reform of Patent System in Japan and Challenges--Sadao Nagaoka
Reform of Patent System in Japan and Challenges--Sadao Nagaoka
Pages 153-168
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From page 153... ...
Furthermore, it expanded the fast track system of patent examination to allow an applicant with an application to a foreign patent office to enjoy a fast track too.
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From page 154... ...
Section 2 provides a brief discussion of the patent system reform in Japan in recent years. Section 3 covers the need for efficient patent examination to handle the rapidly growing number of patent applications and their growing complexity as well as to ensure and their s high patent quality.
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suggests that weak copyright and patent protection of software in Japan retarded the development of prepackaged software industry in Japan, since the protection of IPRs by contractual means is not effective for prepackaged software unlike custom software. PRePublication coPy
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3. eFFicient Patent eXaMinationS The basic objective of a patent system is to promote innovation.
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3.1 increasing Patent examination Requests and increasing complexity of a Patent There has been a significant increase in the number of patent examinations requested as well as in the number of claims per patent in Japan for the past decade or so, as seen in Figure 1. Unlike the United States, Japan has not seen a significant increase in the number of patent applications relative to the level of real industrial R&D spending.
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From page 158... ...
of examinations requested 7 200,000 6 5 150,000 4 100,000 3 2 Industrial R & D 50,000 1 0 0 2000 2004 2003 2002 2001 1990 1996 1998 1999 1994 1995 1992 1993 1997 1991 Year FiGuRe 1 Increasing patent examination requests and increasing number of claims per nagaoka_01.eps patent. SOURCE: The numbers of examinations requested are from the annual reports of Japanese Patent Office.
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From page 159... ...
Such a decline of the grant rate was due to the stricter standards applied by the JPO since 2000, in particular with respect to the inventive step.9 2000, Tightening the standards reflected the complaints of Japanese industry over the deterioration of patent quality in earlier years. The effect of a stricter application of the inventive step was especially substantial in the area of business-method related software patents, where the grant rate declined from more then 30 percent in late 1990s to 8 percent in 2004.
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SOURCE: Derived from Japanese Patent Office Annual Reports. The second measure was to double patent examination fees so that they would at least cover direct costs.
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Inventing firms have preferred patent protection because they want to obtain a solid basis for protecting their inventions when necessary by asking when the patent office to examine their inventions before they actually use them. 10 The availability of technical evaluation for a utility model does not help much.
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From page 162... ...
Fourth, international collaboration among U.S., Japanese, and European patent offices for mutual recognition of search results and examination results would significantly leverage the examination resources globally. Currently, applications from the United States and Europe to Japan add up to around 45,000 per year, which was around one-fifth of the examination requests to the JPO in 2004.
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From page 163... ...
A Human Necessities 27,981 26.1 49.3 B Performing Operations: Transporting 87,715 28.2 51.9 C Chemistry, Metalurgy 62,307 27.3 45.4 D Textiles, Paper 11,704 27.6 48.1 E Fixed Constructions 10,684 23.5 45.9 F Mechanical Engineering, Lighting, 32,845 29.9 52.8 Heating, Weapons, Blasting G Physics 143,020 32.1 60.7 H Electricity 115,305 33.2 61.4 Total 491,561 30.3 55.6 For ultimately granted patents total 582,737 27.8 49.3 SOURCE: Sadao Nagaoka, "How Does Priority Rule Work? Evidence from the patent examination records in Japan," Paper presented for Patent Statistics and Innovation Research Workshop, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, November 25, 2005.
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, ing its Thus, it would be very important for the disclosed information of patents to be easily searchable and accessible to firms. Given that the marginal cost of making the search database and search tools of the patent office available for the public would be low and that its patent database is an important knowledge infrastructure for invention and innovation, it would be very important for the patent offices to facilitate the access to these databases and search tools, exploiting IT technology fully.
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Thus, it 13When the firms with essential patents commit themselves for a fixed royalty of the standard tech nology irrespective of the ex-post increase of the number of essential patents, such ex-post increase of the number of essential patents affect only the distribution of the royalty revenues among licensors and do not cause holdup problems. This is actually the case for MPEG2 and DVD patent pools.
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SOURCE: Based on Sadao Nagaoka, Naotoshi Tsukada, and Tomoyuki Shimbo, "The Emergence and Structure of Essential Patents of Standards: Lessons from Three IT Stan nagaoka_03.eps dards," IIR Working Paper WP#06-08, Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University, 2006. is possible for a firm to hold up the firms using a standard by obtaining a patent based on old (unpublished)
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From page 167... ...
patent law. Thus, there is a risk that merely experimenting with the invention of other firms for the purpose of improvement or inventing-around is an infringement, whereas forcing a firm to get a license for such use would significantly harm cumulative research.
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From page 168... ...
Evidence from the Patent Examination Records in Japan." A Paper Presented for Patent Statistics and Innovation Research Workshop, November 25. Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo.
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