As most people know, Japan’s market is controlled by the heavy hand of government. To make it easier for companies to start new businesses, the government prepared the ”Gray Area Resolution System” in 2014. This system allows business operators to make inquiries about whether or not some regulation is applied to a new business they are going to start. Recently, a company which provides a software which helps users prepare trademark applications used this system to make an inquiry about whether selling this software violates a provision of Patent Attorneys Act which restricts the services provided by other than patent attorneys or patent professional corporations. Then, Japan Patent Office (JPO) […]

IPBC Japan 2018 began with a keynote speech by Naoko Munakata, commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), in Tokyo on September 13. Munakata introduced the recent measures taken by the JPO, such as; SEP licensing negotiation guide Startup support system (Fast track examination, Dispatch of experts for IP advice, financing, and business) Collection of patent examination cases in the field of  artificial intelligence (AI) In addition, Munakata said that the JPO is considering measures to improve attractiveness of intellectual property litigation system, especially from the following two aspects; Improvement of evidence collection procedures for IP right holders to collect all the necessary information to prove infringement and calculate damages […]

Recently, alternative lending has been attracting attention in Japan. Alternative lending is a business loan option that falls outside of a traditional bank loan. For example, a Japanese electronic commerce and Internet company Rakuten gives a loan to its online shopping site owners using daily accounting data, and an accounting software company Yayoi also provides a loan to the users based on accounting data stored in the cloud. The banks seem to be losing opportunities to make a loan. Considering such situation, some banks reportedly have started collaboration with IT companies to develop similar services. There have been move to use intellectual property information for examination of new loans. Japan […]

The machine translation system of the Japan Patent Office (JPO) will be upgraded in May 2019. Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation (TDS), which was split off from Toshiba Corporation in July 2017, won a contract with the JPO for the  development of the system. According to the announcement on July 10 2018, in order to improve translation accuracy, the new system will adopt the technologies to: automatically extract Claims and fixed format parts from a patent document using TDS’s natural language processing system and appropriately distribute them to NMT (Neural Machine Translation), RBMT (Rule Based Machine Translation), and SMT (Statistical Machine Translation); and format input sentence. As for NMT, it will […]

On May 16, The Japan Patent Office (JPO) released the updates on business-related inventions which are defined as invention which realizes a business method by using information and communication technology. As previously reported, patent applications of business-related inventions have been on an increasing trend since 2011, and approximately 7,900 patent applications for business-related inventions were filed in 2016 (increase of 11.1% over the previous year), in spite of the downward trend in the number of domestic patent applications. Especially, patent applications in the financial sector (which should include FinTech) markedly increased in 2016 (increase of 40% over the previous year). The patent grant rate for business-related inventions is almost 70%. […]