Standards and Patents:
The Academic Challenges
Prof. R.C.Tripathi and Dr. M.D.Tiwari
Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad
ITU Workshop on Standards and IPR’s
New Delhi, December 19-20, 2011
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Introduction: The Importance of Patents
Importance of Standards
The Academic Challenges: Standards and Patents
Search of Technology/ Patents from Product Specifications
Technology Found
Features and Relevant Patents
Conclusion
References
1. Introduction: The Importance of
Patents
 Technology advancements need strong R&D background and
specific approach towards the delivery of new goods and
services to the market.
 Research and Development departments in the Academic and
Research Organizations focus primarily towards the best way
to achieve their new technical advancements.
 The technical advancements need successive prior art for the
realization of new technologies.
 These prior arts come from various research papers and
other scientific articles. But Patents play the most vital roles
in the advancements of new technologies.
Contd..
 Patents are the best resource for tracking of the latest
advancements in technology. They are tracked regularly
especially by the competitive companies, R&D labs and
individuals.
 Based on various parameters of concern including technology
trends, references and the usage of the technologies, the
relevant patents may be retrieved to unveil the technology of
a product (Ridley, 2002).
Contd.
 The research and development of the companies and
organization or academic institution focus only the technical
challenges and technical problem to enhance the technical
capability.
 Technical advancement achieve the very focus technical
challenges and find out the possible solution.
 Technical solutions and advancement protected by the IPR’s
and it often by a patent.
 In the period of marketing and uses of technical advancement
the manufacturer set the standard and they follow the steps
of the standard body.
2. Importance of Standards
 Standards influence almost every facet of our lives. They influence
the food we eat, our means of communication, travel, work, play
and endless other activities.
 Almost every product available in the marketplace has been
developed in compliance with one or more voluntary or
mandatory standards.
 Mandatory standards generally pertain to health, safety or the
environment and are set and enforced by the relevant government.
Most standards are voluntary, however.
 Technical standards may comprise of a standard specifications,
standard test methods, standard procedures and practices etc.
Contd…
 Standardization is the process of developing and implementing
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standards so as to facilitate manufacturing, sales, after maintenance
services, future refurbishing of the machines, devices, apparatus,
equipments, methodologies etc.
The goals of standardization accordingly help to circumvent the
monopoly of the suppliers, compatibility, interoperability, safety,
repeatability, quality etc.
Standardization is implemented mostly when companies release
new products and their models to the market.
The final product is a combination of new technologies recently
patented as well as combination of certain very established
technology to make a integral product/service.
Thus the technology get hidden inside the standard products/
services.
Contd..
 Global
Standard body like International Standard
Organization (ISO) create and maintain the standard for the
products and services with a global perspective facilitating
the industries to capture the global market.
 Country- specific standards also take into consideration the
geographical and local issues as well.
3. The Academic Challenges:
Standards and Patents
 Technical standards are generally developed and revised
collaboratively by technical committees of Standard
Development Organizations (SDOs) comprising a number
and variety of stakeholders.
 The academic challenges comprise of developing the new
technologies, products and services and theories the concepts
for the technical advancements.
 In the line of this, one such challenge is to find out the
underneath technology patents from the known standards of
a product so as to keep a watch whose technology/ patents
has been utilized in a product or service now prevailing in the
market.
4. Search of Technology/ Patents from
Product Specifications
 IIITA – Patent Referral Centre has been seized with the above
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problem in line with its development of Plagiarism detection tool.
As a test case, the study has been made to developed methodology
how one can find out the underneath patents utilized by a mobile
based on the standard specifications publicized by its manufacturer
over the internet
The work is initiated by entering the mobile model number. Based
on this model number, the technical specifications are gathered
from the internet.
For this, the website named as ‘Mobile Review’ has been used to
obtain the comprehensive technical specification of the chosen
model.
The system then extracts all the related patents by searching the
selected patent databases.
Contd..
 The system then automatically connects to the internet and does
its own work. Whenever the system finds technology, its patents
are searched and then displayed turn by turn (Google Patents
Database).
 A lot of research has been done earlier in the field of web page
retrieval/information retrieval (Casey, 2008).
 In the literature survey regarding the target work, various articles
on editing and saving the web pages have been utilized.
 Using the available techniques of web page retrieval and then
manipulating the data, a comprehensive input set is developed
which is utilized in the searching of the patent databases (Haay,
2001).
Contd..
 Various page ranking algorithms have been tried before
refining the search query as well as the output generated by
our software tool.
 The patents structure has been properly used in order to
improve the efficiency of the software tool.
 Based on the improved page ranking and efficiency
algorithms, the efficacy of the search is refined.
The User Interface
Fig1. Displaying the User Interface
Contd..
 In the specific search for technology by the product
specifications, whenever the user decides to enter particular
model of a mobile device, he/she is advised to enter the
complete mobile device model specifically (Ex.: Nokia 1100,
Nokia N90, etc.)
 In the beginning, the module gathers all the required
technical specifications of the same. This is based on language
processing of WebPages. Next, these technical specifications
shall be searched in the patent databases available online.
 This process is refined based on the search query and the
ranking of various patents.
Contd..
 All the keywords extracted are serially searched from the
patent databases (Haay and Nilsson, 2000). For parsing the
results to arrive on relevant references, these search pages
are again pre processed as above and only the important
information of the first page of the patents are extracted
from such web pages (Information Retrieval Service).
 This data is further cross referenced with the USPTO patents
database and the ‘Referenced By’ count is obtained from this
database. Figure 2 below describes the interconnection of
various modules of the present system.
Cond..
Fig.2
5. Technology Found
 After searching the product specifications the system
found the technology for the searching the relevant
patents using these specifications. The example Product
is NOKIA Mobile.
Fig3. Technology found from the mobile specification
Contd..
 After searching on the different databases the relevant
patents retrieved on the basis of technology found
Fig4. Displaying the patents found on the basis of specification of the mobile
6. Features and Relevant Patents
 The patents retrieved by the system arranged in the
ordered of features of the product taken on account.
Fig5. Displaying the patents found arranged on the basis of specification of the mobile
7. Conclusion
 The present work illustrates how one can find the patents
underneath the technical specifications of latest products
entering into the market.
 A typical case of a mobile device has been solved amicably.
This may be the most required information for competing
global corporates in the market who are manufacturing
similar products, R&D labs engaged in the product type and
the individuals having interest for technology mapping of the
current products.
 Thus, one must realize that the simple search may not expose
and enable to get access to the specifications-based patents
for all the component techniques used in the product.
Contd..
 Once a technology/set of patents for a particular function
are identified, their various use cases in the field may be
explore.
 Looking into the use cases of each possible domain, the
corresponding problems of interfacing, data collection, data
processing, data transmission etc may be further explore and
standard for each application domain may be evoloved.
 Such type of innovations may prove very beneficial in
harnessing the synergic benefits of the current
patents/technologies.
Contd..
 The assessment of the completeness of the keywords package
may likely be a subjective judgment. Another issue is the
identification of the most relevant patents covering all the
keywords.
 A typical use of our product in general could result in
identifying overlapping patents assigned to competing
agencies, covering a feature.
 In such a case one has to adopt only the trial and error
procedure to track them to their origin and usages.
Contd..
 Based on various ranking algorithms and search queries, the
results obtained can be further modified and efficiency may
be further improved. All the processes are dynamically
executed by directly connecting to the internet and parsing
the web pages.
 A generic system can thus be created for technology
unveiling of any product of interest. It can help in the patent
watch system of the attorneys and company CEO’s for the
products of their interest.
8. References
1.
Kumar, R., Tripathi, R.C. and Tiwari, M.D. (2011) ‘Unveiling the technology: a case
study for cellular mobile phones’, Int. J. Intellectual Property Management, Vol. 4, No. 4,
pp.211–219.
2.
Casey, M.A., Veltkamp, R., Goto, M., Leman, M., Rhodes, C. and Slaney, M.
(2008)‘Content-based music information retrieval: current directions and future
challenges’,Proceedings of the IEEE,April ,Vol. 96, No. 4, pp.668–696.
3. Haay, H-M. and Nilsson, J.F. (2000) ‘Approaches to concept based exploration of
information resources’, in Abramowicz, W. and Zurada, J. (Eds.): Knowledge Discovery for
Business Information Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Chap. 4, pp.89–111
4. Kobayashi, M. and Takeda, K. (2000) ‘Information retrieval on the web’, ACM Computing
Surveys, June,Vol. 32, No. 2, pp.144–173.
5. Ridley, D. (2002) Information Retrieval Scifinder and SciFinder Scholar, JohnWiley and Sons Ltd
Publication, 26 February 2002, Online book.
Contd..
Thank You
Research Paper
 Unveiling the technology: a case study for cellular mobile phones.
Author: Ranjeet Kumar, R.C.Tripathi, M.D.Tiwari
Abstract: Patents are the best resource for tracking of the latest advancements in
technology. They are tracked regularly especially by the competitive companies, R&D
labs and individuals. Based on various parameters of concern including technology
trends, references and the usage of the technologies, the relevant patents are retrieved to
unveil the technology of a product (Ridley, 2002). In the present work, as a test case
parsing the technical specifications of the given mobile device, a comprehensive search
technique of the patent databases has been established by applying ranking methods based
on ‘Referenced By’ for each patent. These are then re-ordered for identifying the most
likely patents along with their URL links involved in the current technology. This has
been exemplified using a typical case of a mobile device, i.e., ‘cell phone’. The results
obtained cover all the software and hardware technologies involved in making of a new
device as distinct from its older versions to track the latest technological advancements
implemented in a product of one’s interest.
Keywords: device specification; patent; information retrieval; cellular mobiles; technology
mapping; intellectual property rights.
Int. J. Intellectual Property Management,Vol. 4, No. 4, Nov.2011