Cooperative Patent Classification Hits 100%

100% Coverage - Finally

This week is the first week that all newly granted patents contain Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) symbols.  It's been a long haul.  A lot of folks were focused on USPTO's granting of patent number 9,000,000.  We think the CPC news  is a much bigger achievement.

Next up, when will the CPC become the primary resource for examiners to search for prior art.  While the USPC is essentially a static collection of organized prior art, to date, we haven't seen a lot of growth in the Field of Search data indicating the wide use of the CPC for searching.  Perhaps this will increase when patent applicants include CPC data on their information disclosure statements.  Our guess is that it will be a long, long time before that happens unless USPTO mandates that they will only accept CPC symbols on the IDS.

This week's Box Scores are up.  Another interesting week in patent land.  So many multiplexed communication inventions again.  Geez.

Well, enough patent geekery for a Friday.  Have a great weekend.

The Secret Language of Patents

The difficulty of forming a clear conception of the subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use words in novel and inconsistent ways.
— The Difficulty of Forming a Clear Conception: The Telegraph. Harpers Magazine 366, 1873

A Glossary of USPTO's Terms of Art

This is a glossary of the terms the USPTO has defined within the US Patent Classification System — The USPC.

USPTO's Own Patent Argot 
USPTO uses these words to define what the specific term means in the context of the classifications. There are also terms of art — a term that has a specialized meaning in a particular chemical, electrical, or mechanical scientific or engineering domain. Within the current US Patent Classification system a word can have a different meaning depending on the area of invention that it resides in. There are three different definitions for the word "Active" — one that pertains to pharmacology and biology; one that relates to plant growth; and a third that deals with an "active database." There are five definitions of "Acylic", three for "Address Data"; five for "Alkali Metals", and we aren't even out of the A's yet.

For people who aren' patent cognoscenti, finding the specific definitions for particular terms in your industry or one you want to explore can be difficult. So we assembled all of the definitions in one place. Here all of the terms are presented in alphabetical order along with the class from which we harvested the definition. The USPC Glossary enables you to browse all of the different definitions for the same term in one place and see what the specific patent class is where the definition is used.

Cooperative Patent Classification SystemUSPTO and their colleagues at the European Patent Office (EPO) are moving to a new the Cooperative Patent Classification System (CPC). Our classification experts are on the job builidng tools to help you transition from the USPC to the CPC. As the Cooperative Patent Classification system evolves, we will add any new or different definitions that arise to assist you in making the transition to the new classification system. We will also seeing if there are differences that warrant thinking about inventions in a new way in order to look for an find prior art. The change in classification philosophy from classifying based on the claim to classifying the invention in light of the claim is probably going to require a different perspective in the hunt for prior art.

We hope this is a helpful tool for exploring the patentsphere.

| A | B | C-CL | CM-CZ | D-DIM | DIM-DZ | E | F | G | H | I | J-K | L | M-MET | METH-MZ | N | O | P-PHA | PHE-PON | POR-PZ | Q | R | S-SEPA | SEPO-SMT | SN-STEM| STEP-SZ | T-TOG | TON-TZ | U | V | W | X-Z |

A Caveat
The Definitions were taken verbatim from the USPC Class Definitions. We are in the process of integrating the images that help explain the definitions. They should be available shortly, If you would like to see the rest of the information about a particular class, just use the link next to the definition an it will take you to USPTO USPC digital repository.

Where To Find Business Method Patents in 2013

The US Patent Classification System (USPC) is the only major patent classification system that is not based on the World International Patent Organization's International Patent Classification (IPC) system.  The USPTO and its colleagues in the European Patent Office (EPO) have been working on developing a new classification schema based on the EPO's European Classification System (ECLA).

The motivation to moving toward a new system was two fold.  First, the current USPC was becoming outdated and its structure didn't lend itself to the frequent updates needed for rapidly changing scientific and technical innovations.  Second, the USPC was the only major classification system that was NOT based on the International Patent Classification System.

The result was an bilateral agreement between USPTO and EPO to develop a join classification system to be used by both organizations.   The USPTO and the EPO are developing the Cooperative Patent Classification System (CPC),  a new classification system based on the EPO ECLA classification scheme, currently available via ESPACENET. ECLA, and soon to be the CPC, is drastically different from the current US Patent Classification system.

The 2012 Business Methods Partnership Meeting featured a presentation on the CPC.
According to John Weiss, a Supervisory Patent Examiner in Tech Center 3600 who presented “Introduction to the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) - EPO and USPTO Bi-Lateral Classification System”, Class 705 where most business methods are classified was determined to be a good candidate for early conversion to the new CPC scheme. During the past year US and European representatives negotiated the final CPC business methods scheme.

Business methods are found under the current ECLA G06Q scheme. Reviewing the scheme, it is evident that many of the Class 705 subclasses have been merged with the ECLA system. In contrast to the current US system of classes and subclasses, the ECLA, and soon CPC, system uses a group symbol of multiple components.

Here's how the new scheme looks.

Symbol	Component Description
G	Section (A, B, … H)
G06	Class (any 2 digits)
G06Q	Subclass (any letter)
G06Q 30/00	Main Group
G06Q 30/016	Subgroup

Weiss showed the Main Groups that will soon be the classification “home” for business methods patents:

• G06Q 10/00 — Administration Management 
• Resource Management, Shipping, Human Resources, Hiring. These represent ‘behind the scenes’ aspects of business operations that customers normally don’t see.
• G06Q 20/00 — Payment architectures, schemes or protocols
  • Electronic Funds Transfer, Billing Systems, Authorization
• G06Q 30/00 — Commerce, e.g., shopping or e-commerce
  • Sales, Customer Service, Marketing. These represent the ‘up-front, customer-facing’ aspects of business operations. It is broader than equivalent subclasses currently in the USPC; advertising falls here.
• G06Q 40/00 — Finance; Insurance; Processing of taxes
  • Banking, Accounting, Credit/Loan approval. This includes financial portfolio inventions.
• G06Q 50/00 — Systems or methods specially adapted for a specific business sector, e.g., utilities or tourism
  • Social networking, Utility, Real Estate, Legal Services, Healthcare. Social networking and healthcare inventions are growing at a rapid rate at the USPTO, according to Weiss.

Mr. Weiss concluded his presentation noting that some areas of current USPC Class 705 best fit outside the ECLA/CPC G06Q symbol, and that some outside of Class 705 were pulled in to this European subclass revision.

There are several key points that have large implications for future classification and prior art searches of US inventions were not addressed:

The PGPubs and US Patent databases will be merged under the new system. There are significant quality issues associated with documents in the PGPub database related to claim structure, overall wording, and classification.  One of the issues here is that under the USPC there are circumstances where the scope of the invention morphs during patent prosecution.  This means that the new CPC will not account for those subtle changes in what constitutes the protected invention.

Under the CPC system, documents will be classified based on “invention information” guided by the claims. This change introduces a significant subjectivity into classification.  Although patents classified under the new system will have multiple classifications, documents will no longer have original (OR) or cross-reference (XR) classifications.

Many important aspects of the CPC have yet to be finalized:

• It is unclear whether the new CPC data will be present on the front page of the printed patent.
• The data products needed to update current commercial patent tools have not been developed.
• The XML file format for the definitions and the symbol scheme has not been finalized.
• It isn't clear how the Master Classification File and other supporting files will be made available to users.
• There is no training on the new system planned for external practitioners and there was little discussion on the impact of the change on prior art researchers.  (A panel of speakers from PIUG presented an excellent list of concerns at the July CPC External User Meeting.

The system is intended to be implemented beginning January 1, 2013 with a two-year transition period in the US during which USPTO examiners will be using both systems. USPTO’s contractor for PGPubs classification is expected to begin using the new CPC system at the beginning of 2013.  In the short term, USPTO will continue to use the USPC for routing purposes.  (So now the patent examiners have yet another classification system to work with.)

The impact on the quality of prior art searching is also a serious concern.  Questions posed by audience members at both the CPC Users Meeting and the Business Methods Partnership Meeting regarding training for practitioners and users outside the USPTO did not receive particularly detailed responses. Apparently the plan is that there will be online training modules available, sometime, somewhere.  (In both cases the vibe was, "we'll get back to you on this one."

The USPTO directs questions to details and status of the Cooperative Patent Classification system to the official CPC website. For a program with such large implications for IP prosecution in the US, the USPTO web page is remarkably free of easily-located and prominent information on the upcoming changes. You have to burrow in to the Office of Classification page before you find a link to the CPC, and that page provides no information other than to include a link to the CPC. For all of the focus on External Users, this is curious.

But here is a more fundamental business methods question.   How is including US business methods patents in a cooperative program with the EPO, which doesn’t allow business methods patents, actually going to work?