On March 1 2019, the Japanese government announced that it submitted a bill to the Diet to amend the laws of patent, utility model, design and trademark. The major part of the amendment lies in the patent law and the design law. And we reported most of them in the previous articles. But we would like to pull them together here to show the outline of the amendment of Japanese patent law and design law for your reference. Patent Law Introduction of inspection procedure. Courts will be able to issue the inspection order, in response to the patent holder’s motion, by which neutral experts inspect the facility of the alleged infringer to […]

We Japanese often say “お変わりありませんか？(okawari-arimasenka?)” that means, in English, “Nothing has happened (or everything remains unchanged)?” to someone whom we meet after a long interval. No change is a good thing in Japanese culture. I’m just wondering if we can change such a greeting to something by which we can expect or accelerate change. JPO commissioner Naoko Munakata mentioned the necessity of improvement of Japanese IP litigation system and demonstrated the high level of interest, in an opening speech for Global IP Strategy Forum 2019 which was held on January 28 2019 in Tokyo. However, I have seen a difference of opinion between SMEs and large enterprises,  a conservative court, […]

The previous article on possible revision of IP litigation system covered different positions taken by large companies and SMEs; – i.e SMEs asking for improvement of the status of patent holders and large companies wanting the maintenance of  the status quo. Now another confrontation between them has been obtaining attention. According to the document distributed in a government-appointed working group discussing the improvement of business conditions for SMEs or subcontracting companies, some experts in the field of antitrust and subcontracting law have brought up the issue of intellectual property rights and know-how having been siphoned from subcontracting companies into large companies in dominant bargaining position. In response to this suggestion, […]

The discussion on possible revision of Japan’s intellectual property dispute resolution system, reported in the previous article, has started from last October, and the second meeting was held on November 21 2018 at the Japanese Patent Office (JPO), on which I had a chance to sit in. The objective of the meeting was to hear opinions from users of the litigation system, i.e. a lawyer, Masakazu IWAKURA (Partner at TMI Associates), Keidanren for the voice of big business in Japan, and The Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI) for the voice of SMEs. In their presentations, large companies seemed to want the continuation of the status, while SMEs want […]

A Japanese local government Kawasaki-city, which plays an active role in patent licensing between large companies and SMEs as presented here, has set out on a new endeavor. Kawasaki-city invites creators to an IP business matching event to ask them to propose applications of patented technologies of participant large companies. For this, Kawasaki-city works with an agent company CREEK & RIVER to ask dispatch of the creators. Here is a press release (in Japanese) for this project, published by CREEK & RIVER. In this scheme, the key is whether or not the creators can propose specific products that SMEs are most interested in implementing such patented technologies. Also, extra care […]

Here are some useful patent research & analysis methods to identify salable or licensable patents, responding to previous article. 1. Technology trend research  This research is for reviewing whether or not a subject patent is likely to be used, from the viewpoint of technology trends. For a technology that is not used in the market, a patent for that technology has less opportunity to be sold or licensed. 2. Market research This is for researching current and future market size and trends of products or services related to a subject patent. Some investment is required to enter a new business or developing a new technologies. If the expected return does […]

“Patent utilization” has been a buzz word in Japanese IP industry. There seems to be an increasing number of companies thinking that they should make effective use of patents that haven’t been used by themselves; i.e. monetize such patents by selling or licensing them to others. Actually, a client of ours has asked me what salable or licensable patents are like. First of all, you may need to know when a patent transaction occurs. One is when a company has to use a patent. In other words, it is the case that the company possibly infringes someone’s patent. We may be able to call this case an assertion-based transaction, since […]

On September 6 2018, Tokyo District Court dismissed the GREE’s claim against Supercell in a patent infringement case, which was previously reported here. GREE demanded JPY 100 million (approx. USD 909,000) in damages from Supercell for the patent infringement by the layout editor of  “Clash of Clans”. In this case, the interpretation of “the whole game space … chosen by player” in Claim 6 and 8 of the subject patent (JP 5952947) became an issue, especially from the viewpoint of how a player chooses the whole game space. The judge examined the description of the specification and the response to an office action, and concluded that the player chooses a certain […]

Japan has a national holiday called “Marine Day”. It was July 16 this year. The purposes of the holiday is to give thanks to ocean’s bounty and to consider the importance of the ocean to Japan as an island nation. It’s good time to think about the destruction of the environment of the ocean. Ocean pollution arising from plastic garbage has been getting worse. Reportedly, more than 8 million tons of plastics enter the ocean every year. It destroys the ocean ecosystem and also possibly causes human health damage through seafood.   UN DECLARES WAR ON OCEAN PLASTIC Japan is the second largest in the per capita amount of garbage […]

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 […]