[tweetmeme source=”Intellogist” only_single=false]A few months ago I was asked to recommend sources for searching patent litigation in various European jurisdictions. I was able to scrape some country-specific sources together, but for the most part patent litigation data is fragmented and scattered. It would have been easier if I could have consulted a global search service combining litigation data from multiple national jurisdictions. So I was quite interested to read that Innography is releasing a new add-on data package to their product that will include international patent litigation data.
Innography already offered litigation data from US federal courts, but has now added cases from US International Trade Commission (ITC) investigations, as well as sources from the following countries:
- Australia: Federal Court of Australia
- Canada: Federal Court of Canada
- China: China Supreme People Court
- France: National Institute of Industrial Property
- Germany: Germany Federal Supreme Court
- Japan: Satoshi Takara High Court
- United Kingdom: England and Wales High Court, Court of Justice of the European Communities
The Innography representative I spoke to told me that their exact sources for this data were proprietary, and they were not intending to reveal them! This makes it clear that the collection is going to remain unique for a while, but makes it difficult to know if there are any weaknesses in their supply chain.
You can get access to this data by subscribing to an “add-on” data package in Innography, called “extended references.” Although I’ve highlighted the international litigation content in this post, “extended references” will also include technical standards and pharmaceutical sources (such as the FDA Orange Book and Green Book).
A demo of Innography’s Fall 2010 release is available from the Innography website. The service appears to work by cross referencing patent numbers contained in litigation, standards and pharmaceutical sources. Users can do a keyword search through the Innography patent database, and then use a pop-out filter to view any related litigation, standards and pharmaceutical sources that reference patents contained in the results set. Alternatively, the demo explained that users can search on a particular standard and see all the patent documents referenced by that standard; the Fall 2010 demo did not show this feature working on a particular instance of litigation, but right now I assume this type of search can be done for the litigation data also.
Other new features include a semantic search option that has been created through a partnership with TextWise. Rather than using Latent Semantic Analysis, the Innography implementation relies on TextWise proprietary search technology. Like other semantic search implementations, users can search by inputting either a block of text or a patent number of interest. Unlike TotalPatent’s semantic search implementation, users will not be able to make manual adjustments to the query executed by the semantic engine.
How excited are you about this new collection? Any comments about what the Innography fall release may be missing from their international litigation data sources? Let us know in the comments!
This post was edited by Intellogist Team member Kristin Whitman. The Intellogist blog is provided for free by Intellogist’s parent company, Landon IP, a major provider of patent search, technical translation, and information services.
Filed under: Patent Search News | Tagged: Asian litigation, Australia, Canada, china, EP litigation, France, Germany, Innography, International Trade Commission, ITC, japan, litigation, LSA, semantic, TextWise, United Kingdom |
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Kristin,
Great work! I think there is definitely a need for this, as IP owners are interested in a more global view of their IP position.
The lack of transparency on identifying the data sources is troubling, however. I’m sure Innography won’t be making any warranties or reps about the data. As a customer, I don’t know how you would independently verify accuracy or completeness.
That said, it is more information than we had before, which is usually a good thing.
In full disclosure, I am an Innography employee, and wanted to answer the question about the sources.
We’re very excited to offer these unique sources that have taken us over 3 years to develop.
As for the transparency and verification, we have published the courts in order to help provide attribution for the data for further investigation. We also are adding a display to show the text of the court information to show the parties involved, the decision, subject matter, etc. This should provide a lot more context to help you verify this information as well.
Thank you for the feedback and we look forward to making our information as useful as possible. Please let us know if there are other data sources you’d like us to research as well.
Thanks so much for posting, guys!
I got some interesting feedback on a LinkedIn thread about this post. An interested party mentioned that while the list of sources is impressive, it is of course still quite limited, so she is hoping to see more sources added over time.
She also asked if there was an alert service available for new litigation. Innography representative, would you care to comment on this? It wasn’t clear to me from the demo.
Thanks!
Kristin