International Activities
The 17th Industry Trilateral Meeting
The 11th Trilateral User Meeting and Trilateral Offices and Users Working Level Meeting
The 17th Industry Trilateral Meeting was held on April 12, 2012 at JIPA Tokyo office. The representatives from AIPLA, IPO, BusinessEurope (BE),and JIPA (hereinafter collectively called “IT”) have gathered twice a year since 2003, based on JIPA’s proposal to set up a forum to discuss common issues and promote patent harmonization.
In this meeting, Harmonization and Patent Classification were mainly discussed, These subjects were progress from the autumn meeting on last November, 2011. Mr. Shobayashi and Mr. Inoue of JIPA Patent Committee were reported on the comparative study about the analysis of the description requirement. It was agreed that JIPA will analyze further detail and feedback its result to other members.
Ms.Tanabe, Chair of JIPA Intellectual Property Information Search Committee gave a presentation on the expectation of Common Hybrid Classification (CHC).She explained comparison of FI and FCLA and the effectiveness of FI as the later analysis. It was agreed that IT will submit its proposals especially promoting the use of CHC to Trilateral Offices.
Furthermore, IT discussed JPO’s state preparations for Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) which had already submitted proposals at JPO and consider IT’s proper response to the Five IP Offices (IP5).
On the next day, April 13, Trilateral IP Offices and IT joint meeting was held at JPO office. IT submitted the trilateral Offices the further request of “Common Citation Document (CCD)” database system. The system was built by EPO following users’ proposal in order to unify the format for citation document. EPO announced that there is a plan to up-grading the system. Then unification of Patent Classification, Harmonization, and the result of the Five IP Office meeting were discussed.
The next meeting will be held in Japan in the autumn of 2012.
