Standards and Patents: The Academic Challenges

1. 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

2. Contents • 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

3. 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.

4. 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).

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. Contd… • Standardization is the process of developing and implementing 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 4. Search of Technology/ Patents from Product Specifications • IIITA – Patent Referral Centre has been seized with the above 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.

11. 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).

12. 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.

13. The User Interface Fig1. Displaying the User Interface

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. Cond.. Fig.2

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 8. References • 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. • 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. • 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 • Kobayashi, M. and Takeda, K. (2000) ‘Information retrieval on the web’, ACM Computing Surveys, June, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp.144–173. • Ridley, D. (2002) Information Retrieval Scifinder and SciFinder Scholar, John Wiley and Sons Ltd Publication, 26 February 2002, Online book.

25. Contd.. Thank You

26. 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