World IP day 26th April : Plymouth press release

Press release


Meet the Inventors

To celebrate World Intellectual Property Day on Friday 26 April, Plymouth Central Library is displaying all sorts of material on invention and design together with information about organisations offering support and advice. The displays will run throughout the week from Monday 21 April.

A special feature of this year’s WIP Day is a Cracking Ideas competition organised by the UK Intellectual Property Office. The competition, for 9-and 10-year children in schools, clubs or learning at home, complements the national curriculum and invites entrants to participate in a lesson focussing on sustainable energy, the theme of the new Wallace and Gromit film “A Matter of Loaf and Death”. More information can be found on the Cracking Ideas website at www.crackingideas.com

On Wednesday 23 April between 2pm and 4pm the Central Library is inviting everyone to Meet the Inventors. If you’ve ever had a Eureka moment, or want to know how to get your bright ideas, designs and inventions marketed and produced, then come and meet the inventors for information, help and advice at Plymouth’s Central Library.

Members of the South West Inventors Club and the Wadebridge and Cornwall Inventors Club will be on hand to answer questions, talk about their experiences and explain the dos and don’ts.

Plymouth Library Services is part of PatLibUK, a network of 13 libraries offering information and resources on all aspects of intellectual property. For further details about Plymouth Library’s WIP Day celebrations, please email reference.library@plymouth.gov.uk, telephone (01752) 305907 or visit our website at www.plymouth.gov.uk/libraries

UKIPO - Electronic Designs Journal

A new Electronic Designs Journal service and changes to the existing journal publications for registered designs

The Designs Journal (currently known as "Designs in View") is now available electronically via our website, under the new title of "Electronic Designs Journal" and, from 1 April 2008, a paper version of the journal will no longer be published.

The new Electronic Designs Journal will enable users to access register information and notices and will provide full colour images of each design that has recently been accepted for registration and publication.


Also, from 1 April 2008 onwards, to coincide with the introduction of the Electronic Designs Journal and the new E-Patents Journal (coming into being on 2 April 2008), the journal known as the Patents & Designs Journal will no longer be produced. Information on registered designs will, thereafter, only be available via the Electronic Designs Journal.

Any enquiries about the new designs system, contact Mark Studley on
01633 811155.


Jill



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Jill Durdin
Business Outreach and Education
UK Intellectual Property Office

Further to Steve's news

Some of the old UK patent abridgements are also on Google Books. I'm not sure how many as I've only just found them, but this could mean a saving on some open shelf space and a considerably easier time searching for old patents....any thoughts?

Chris Brown, Manchester PATLIB

Interesting news from Steve Van Dulken at the British Library!

Google has digitized the 1617-1852 Chronological Index for English patents, and have placed it at http://books.google.com/books?id=L7dzFhUqKD0C&dq=%22
It can be searched for within Google: I found it by accident, asking for <"John Bond" and patentee>.
The implications are huge. Using the link above, you can keyword search the entire text, looking for words like Ipswich, chemist, indiarubber and the like. Remote customers simply need to be told the link.
In addition, all the annual supplements seem to have been added as well – to 1869 at least. The source for the work is cited as the Oxford University.
In addition, the same project has indexed a lot of directories, whose advertisements can offer useful data. An example is the 1855 Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park, which can be found at http://books.google.com/books?id=L7dzFhUqKD0C&dq=%22
That book has 11 mentions of the word patentee, all or mostly within advertisements. It, too, was found with the same search given above. In reality, of course, someone would search in Google generally for such information.
Or, you could go to the website for the project, http://books.google.com/, and enter for example and find over 600 hits. Enjoy !

PATLIB UK AGM / Training Day

The AGM was hosted by the UK IPO at Concept House Newport.


5th December 2007


The Main topic for discussion at the AGM was the recently signed constitution and standards.
Valerie Gray from the EPO was an observer at the meeting and she reminded PATLIBs thinking of submitting a paper for the PATLIB conference in Warsaw 2008 to do so as soon as possible - you should submit your abstracts to Sue Ashpital at the BIPC.
6th December 2007

The UK IPO Training Day started with in-depth sessions on Registered Designs and Trademarks - the run through the UK IPO Trademark Search engine was particularly useful.
In the afternoon the group was treated to a visit to the Central Enquiry Unit where we were shown the state of the art system which helps the unit deal with enquiries from the whole of the UK.
The Training day was finished off with a very interesting talk from the Private Applicants Unit

Search Matters Den Haag September 2007

Search Matters: Seminar on Search & Documentation Working Methods The Hague 10-11 Sept 07

This two-day event was attended by four PATLIB UK members – Maria Lampert & Peter Gibbs from BIPC, Chris Brown from Manchester & Ged Doonan from Leeds – along with over two hundred other delegates from all over Europe. It consisted of a series of lectures & workshops covering a wide range of topics from the general to the specific – and of varying degrees of interest to ourselves.

The lectures covered such subjects as the EPO’s classification strategy and how it stores and classifies new information; the importance of non-patent literature in searching; searching freely-available information sources; and the perspective of a user of the European patent system. This latter talk by Werner Frohling of Volvo included some surprisingly basic information on patenting and searching.

The most valuable part of the event was the workshops. Those I attended included “Computer implemented inventions” – a pretty grey area for most people. The EPO is working on clearer guidelines for such inventions in an attempt to clarify the current situation as far as European Patent applications are concerned. It was a useful discussion, much of it focussing (as you’d expect) on “technical effect,” and the workshop overran by some way.

A related topic was the “Internet as a source of prior art.” The internet is obviously a growing source of information and brings its own difficulties for the searcher. On one hand the possibility of a document being accessed on the internet puts it into the public domain, while on the other hand documents frequently do not remain on the internet and dating the disclosure is often not easy.

Some of these discussions also served as a handy reminder of such things as Google’s advanced search interface where stemming and proximity searching is possible to an extent.

There was an awful lot packed into two days and I was brain-dead by the end of it, but it was certainly a worthwhile event.

Ged Doonan

Today (20/11/07) I had the pleasure of attending the awards ceremony at The Lightbox, Woking where the six finalists of the UKIPO “Cracking idea” competition received their awards.

The six regional finalists were;

Midlands and East region – Brampton Villiage Primary School
South West Region – East Allington Primary School
Wales – Glasllwch Primary school
North East region – Marden Bridge Middle School
South East region – Senacre Wood Primary School
North West region – Marden Bridge Middle School

Among the winning ideas was a dog walking machine, a machine for washing windows and bathrooms and a pair of “helpful hands” designed to “do helpful tasks for you whilst you watch TV”

The overall winning idea was “The Waker-Upper 3000” a machine designed to keep you awake no matter how dull or boring the work you are doing, nor how tired you might be! The winning designers, pupils from East Allington Primary School, were presented with an original trophy created by Aardman Animations. Each of the six regional finalists received a laptop computer and other bits and pieces along with a framed certificate.

Before the presentation of the awards Lord Triesman, the Minister for Innovation, spoke of the importance of IP for the future of the country as he marvelled at the quality of the inventions. He went on to remind the children that not only adults can have IP, children do too!

Lawrence Higgins-smith of the UKIPO was reading out a message of apology from Nick Park, who was unable to attend the ceremony, when a knock on a side door heralded the arrival of Wallace and Gromit much to the delight of the children (and some of the adults!) present.

What I think was probably the high point for the young winning designers was learning that the production team from Dr Who had actually made a prototype of their device which the children were kind enough to model for us.

Maria Lampert
London PATLIB
British Library