International Activities

EPO East Meets West Conference 2014 & the 67th PDG IMPACT Meeting

JIPA’s IP Information Search Committee dispatched a three-member delegation, led by Mr. Inoue, Managing Director to EPO East Meets West Conference 2014 and the 67th PDG IMPACT Meeting, held in Vienna, Austria during April 9-17, 2014. The reason for delegating to the meetings was to interact with the Patent Documentation Group (PDG), which is a user group of EPO, to thereby enhance a patent information environment beneficial for Japanese companies. The delegation took advantage of this to request that the Japanese FI and F-term classification should be incorporated into the CPC patent classification system at the following presentation and meeting. The delegation also interacted with European user groups and shared information.

1. Presentation at the 67th PDG IMPACT Meeting EPO staff members and European users as well as JPO staff members from Japan attended the meeting. The delegation showed comparative examples between areas where CPC was subdivided into smaller classes and FI was subdivided into smaller classes based on the results of investigation by the IP Information Search Committee, and requested the EPO and JPO to take the FI classification system into consideration for CPC. The delegation also showed examples where the concept of the F-term had been already incorporated into the CPC, and requested further incorporation.
The presentation was followed by a vigorous question-and-answer session in which PDG members also expressed a wish to know analytical results providing an overview of the CPC and FI/F-term systems. Dr. Peter Kallas (BASF), chairman of the Meeting, promised that PDG would discuss JIPA's requests. JIPA will continue further discussions with PDG based on the results of the PDG discussion.

2. Meeting with EPO officers in charge of the CPC classification JIPA’s delegation had a meeting with Mr. Pierre Held and Mr. Nelson Das Neves, EPO officers in charge of the CPC classification. Mr. Ota and Mr. Ako, JPO's representatives, and Mr. Tanabe of JETRO also attended the meeting. The delegation stated what expectations Japanese industry had for CPC. The EPO officers responded that they would positively consider reflection of the FI/F-term classification system in CPC. The delegation confirmed that EPO and JPO would promote further cooperation in discussions on the revision of the patent classification which were underway between them. It was a great achievement that the delegation promoted the cooperation between EPO and JPO through the presentation by JIPA at the PDG IMPACT Meeting.

We demonstrated through the above activity that JIPA and PDG, user groups in Japan and Europe, can work together to exert an effective influence on the respective patent offices and contribute to the development of a global patent information search environment. We will regularly exchange information and continue to cooperate with PDG.

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