Press release
Minesoft contribute chapter to Growing Business Innovation: Creating, Marketing and Monetising IP

Minesoft was pleased to be featured in a recent publication titled ‘Growing Business Innovation’. Driving innovation is central to the ethos of Minesoft as a patent solutions provider. With over 70% of the technological and scientific information available in patents inaccessible anywhere else, ignoring patents as an information source at best delays innovation and at worst, prevents it.

Minesoft’s James Cooper and Rahman Hyatt authored a chapter on ‘The Use of Patent Information for Innovation and Competitive Intelligence’. Patent data is an excellent source of external ideas and information that can be used to drive innovation by identifying opportunities and threats to a business; improving its survivability and profitability in the modern marketplace. This information is also crucial to competitive intelligence, which makes use of public information to accrue data on competitors and the market environment to steer strategic decision making.

The chapter covers three different approaches to using patent data and the potential information each approach can generate to drive decision making:

  1. Patent Landscape Analysis
  2. Infringement Searching
  3. Licensing and Portfolio Analysis

“Rahman and I outlined three common uses of patent data to give the reader a basic understanding on the kinds of questions patent information can be used to answer,” says James Cooper, co-author and member of Minesoft’s Support Team. “We explain the processes used to generate valuable information and the tools, like PatBase, that can reduce the time and effort required to obtain them.”

The foreword, authored by Tim Moss, CBE at the UK IPO, highlights the vital role that intellectual property plays in encouraging innovation in all industries, at all levels. The book features contributions from prominent figures in law, IP and business.

Growing Business Innovation is available to buy here.

Press release
Enhanced Legal Status Viewer in PatBase

Being aware of the legal status of patents is critical in business. It is important to track your own portfolio and to keep an eye on when a competitor’s patents will expire since, once expired, anyone can use the patented technology without fear of infringement and litigation. Hence, Minesoft launched an updated Legal Status Viewer and Timeline for PatBase, the global patent database.

The PatBase Legal Status Viewer is one of the most comprehensive available. IP professionals will no longer need to go through the long, manual process of checking with individual Patent Offices to monitor the legal status of different patents within a family. The Legal Status Viewer combines data from a variety of sources, including information directly from European, American and Japanese National Patent Offices, as well as other legal status data in PatBase data feeds.

Users have different options to view the information. The Timeline & Table options have a streamlined design and convenient export tools making it ideal and easy to share with colleagues and/or clients. In addition, the Priority Relationship diagram makes it simple to spot how patents within a family are related by priority number, again, this is easy to export and share throughout the company (even with non-PatBase users!).

Another time-saving functionality is the ability to show calculated expiry dates for each country. The calculated expiry dates do the hard work for you, taking into account not just the different patent terms for each country and type of document, but also additional information (where available), e.g. Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPCs) and Patent Term Extensions (PTEs).

In the Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical area, the length of the patent term can vary where SPCs or PTEs apply. Therefore, it is important to be aware of which patents are affected by these extensions. Companies can apply for SPCs/PTEs if the review process by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), or similar, takes longer than the norm. These extensions can increase the life of a patent by up to 5 years. Where available, this information is taken into consideration by the Legal Status Timeline when calculating the Patent Term Expiry.

Tracking the legal status of patents is essential for any innovation-based industry. For PatBase users, there is no need to waste time and resources monitoring patent status. The Legal Status Viewer does all the hard work, combining several sources of business-critical legal status information on one easy-to-use resource.

Press contact: Caitlin Kavanagh ([email protected])

 

Press release
Minesoft highly commended as ‘Best Business for International Trade’

The Minesoft team was thrilled to be highly commended as ‘Best Business for International Trade’ at the Richmond Business Awards.  

The annual business awards, organised by the Richmond Chamber of Commerce – one of the accredited nationwide British Chambers of Commerce – are a recognition and celebration of regional business success.

As a global patent solutions provider, we aim to encourage innovation worldwide. Since 2010 we have partnered with the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) in the ASPI programme to give researchers in developing countries free or low-cost access to sophisticated tools and services, like PatBase, for retrieving and analysing patent data. In addition, our services and tools provide assistance for international corporations, law firms, patent search firms and universities worldwide, including many FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies.

This November, Minesoft were pleased to sponsor the award category ‘Best Business for Innovation’, encouraging innovation on a local scale. We offer our congratulations to the well-deserved award winner, Bob Harris of EarthDome, for his recent European (EP) patent, and wish him luck with any additional patents currently in the pipeline.

Minesoft co-founder, Ann Chapman-Daniel, is involved with the regional Chamber of Commerce and Richmond Business Investment District to boost local business, ranging from small businesses to corporations, such as eBay and PayPal, and the community as a whole.

Richmond Business AwardsMinesoft was pleased to be highly commended as ‘Best Business for International Trade’. Ann Chapman-Daniel is pictured here alongside all other award winners.

Best Business for International TradeCo-Founder Ann Chapman-Daniel, presents the award for ‘Best Business for Innovation’ to Bob Harris of EarthDome. Pictured here alongside Anne Newton, head of the Richmond Chamber of Commerce, Zac Goldsmith MP and Sir Vince Cable, Leader of the Liberal Democrats.

The Minesoft team enjoyed a night of great food and dancing. We look forward to playing a prominent role in the Richmond Business Awards again in 2018.

Blog
Minesoft meet customers and IP
professionals at IP events around the world

Minesoft have sponsored, exhibited and presented at numerous high-profile Intellectual Property events throughout the first half of 2017, showcasing the very latest product updates to international audiences of IP professionals including patent attorneys, licensing executives and information scientists. Some of the highlights of 2017 so far have included the IPI-ConfEx in Rome, LESI in Paris and PatInfo in Ilmenau, Germany. More…

Blog
Turkish Patent Data added to PatBase

Turkish patent

Despite recent upheavals, the growth of IP and Research in Turkey over recent years has been exponential, with Turkey rising 16 points in the global innovation index in 2016 alone. Government incentives have in part helped the development of the R&D and IP ecosystem, with a growing number of universities now including technology transfer offices, and many domestic and international companies establishing R&D centres across the country to take advantage of these incentives.

Until recently, Turkish patent professionals have found their searches hampered by a lack of Turkish patent information in both public and commercial databases, resulting in the need to search both the Turkish Patent Institute (TPI) database (where captcha codes are required for every search) and an international patent database separately. Likewise, international searchers will have struggled to use the TPI database for keyword searching as only Turkish keywords can be used.

Minesoft have recently sourced and added up to date Turkish patent and utility model data to PatBase, our global patent database, without the delays experienced by other providers. Furthermore, Minesoft have made it possible to search the Turkish data in both the original language and in English. This is of benefit to both Turkish and international PatBase users as they can search this information at the same time as data from over 106 other issuing authorities.

For more information about PatBase and to request a free trial, please click here.

 

Blog
The Unified Patent Court and Brexit

Minesoft were pleased to support the recently published Intellectual Property report in The Times. One article discussed a current ‘hot’ topic: The impact of Brexit on Intellectual Property. A key argument from the pro-leave camp was the desire to strip away the red tape and bureaucratic procedures enforced by the European Union. However, when it comes to intellectual property, the procedures are there for a reason.

For example, the Unified Patent Court (UPC), a proposed common patent court open for participation to all members of the EU, shows some of the benefits of EU membership. Although the United Kingdom signalled in November 2016 that they intend to ratify the UPC agreement, there is no guarantee what will happen after Brexit. To continue participating, the UK would need to ratify a new international agreement with the EU and amendments would need to be made to the current UPC agreement.

The UK’s participation in the existing European patent system would remain unaffected by Brexit. There are several other non-EU members who are signatories to the European Patent Convention, including Norway, Switzerland and Turkey. However, the purpose behind the UPC was to streamline Europe’s IP process and to try and make patents more enforceable for smaller businesses. This has now been thrown into turmoil; only time will tell whether a genuine Europe-wide patent will be introduced.

Find out more about the impact of Brexit on intellectual property rights, from trademarks to patents, by reading The Times’ Intellectual Property Report here.

 

Blog
USPTO PAIR data now added to PatBase and Legal StatusTracker

The legal status module within PatBase, the trusted search and analysis platform, has now been enhanced to include USPTO PAIR data. This data is as timely as the USPTO public PAIR site and has been merged with the INPADOC legal status data for each US application. Within the legal status view in PatBase we have added a new “Source” column to clearly identify where the legal status information originated and have mapped the USPTO legal status events to our colour coded event groups, making it easier for our users to visually identify the type of event that has occurred. Furthermore, the Register links in PatBase for US publications now directs the user to up to date PAIR information, a full transaction history and links to the assignment history, maintenance fees and file wrapper. The addition of US PAIR data to PatBase is of benefit to our users as it allows them to more efficiently review up to date legal status information for any US application.

Minesoft’s web-based legal status alerting service, Legal Status Tracker, has also been updated to include USPTO PAIR data. Whether you want to monitor all legal status changes or specific type of events, Legal Status Tracker delivers automatic email alerts whenever a change occurs and eliminates the need for lengthy manual legal status checks.

If you’re not already subscribed to PatBase, please visit www.discoverpatents.net to sign up for a two-week FREE trial.

To find out more about Legal Status Tracker and arrange a FREE trial, please click here.

 

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