Conference on Patent Quality Indexing: Who Benefits?

7th Nov 2008

Improving Patent Quality: Who Benefits?

Presented by RSA-United States and IBM
 
A conference on Improving Patent Quality co-sponsored by IBM and RSA-United States took place on Friday, November 7, at Columbia University in New York with keynote speakers, Professor Ronald J. Mann, Co-Chair, Charles E. Gerber Transactional Studies Program of Columbia Law School; Andy Gibbs, CEO of PatentCafe; and Professor Toshiya Watanabe, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo. 

  Professor Ronald Mann of Columbia University

 Professor Toshiya Watanabe of Tokyo University

 Marian Underweiser of IBM

For more information on the RSA Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property please click here.
 
Participants learned about the progress of the Patent Quality Index (PQI) Project, an international effort currently being developed by a team drawn from Columbia Law School and the University of Tokyo. The project seeks to correlate objective characteristics of a patent or application with it's validity, i.e. whether it would be upheld in court. PQI could be used by applicants and patent offices, to help improve both the quality of filed applications as well as the examination process itself, so that issued patents are more likely to be valid patents. 

Andy Gibbs discussed correlating earlier empirical studies of patent quality to findings of validity in US courts before and after the landmark Supreme Court KSR v. Teleflex decision on obviousness.

 
The conference was moderated by Marian Underweiser of IBM and Robin Thompson of the RSA.  A summary report will follow.
 
For more information, please contact Lynn Broadbent LBroadbent@rsa-us.org