What Can Patent Data Tell Us About the Australian Government’s Plan for Local Manufacturing?

This is a guest contribution from Mike Lloyd of Patent-Insights.  Mike previously contributed an article on the impact, from an Australian perspective, of COVID-19 on international patent, trade mark, and registered designs filings.  Further details about the author can be found at the end of the article.

The Australian Federal Government on 1 October 2020 announced a renewed focus and A$1.5 billion investment in manufacturing, in particular in the following six target areas of technology:

1. resources technology and critical minerals;
2. food and beverages;
3. medical products;
4. recycling and clean energy;
5. defence; and
6. space.

The arguments put forward by the Government include wanting to ‘focus on areas of strength’ and wanting to avoid the lesson of ‘don't try to do everything’.

There are merits in these arguments, and there are also arguments for letting market forces rather than governments select our area of strengths.

But because this is a patent blog, I want to ask whether patent data can help to find Australia’s areas of technology strength.

There are many ways we could ask this question, and the most obvious of these might be to look at overall patent filings.  However, this is an imperfect method, as this data risks being corrupted by low quality patents, and there are many low quality patents out there.

Another approach is to look for highly-cited patents. The citing of a patent by another is generally a recognition that the cited patent has made a contribution to the patent literature, and therefore technology in general.  The number of citations for a granted patent can range from zero to over a thousand, but as a simple rule, we could say that any granted patent with 50 or more forward citations is ‘highly-cited’.  To put this into context, the commercial patent search database Patseer lists 8.4 million active and granted patent families (a family with one or more currently granted patents), but only 163,000 (1.9%) of these have 50 or more forward citations.  In contrast, 5.1 million (61%) of granted patents have no forward citations at all.

These ‘highly-cited’ patents could be regarded as the most important patents, and the filers of these patents as leading applicants, i.e. strong in their area of technology.  We could also argue that the more of these highly cited patents that companies have, the more they can be regarded as technology leaders in their space.

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Tags: Guest article, Manufacturing, Patent analytics, Public policy

Has COVID-19 Affected Patent, Trade Mark or Design Filing Activity – an Australian Perspective

This is a guest contribution from Mike Lloyd of Patent-Insights.  Further details about the author can be found at the end of the article.

COVID-19 has had many devastating impacts all around the world, both in terms of fatalities and other health impacts, and also in economic terms.  While the economic impact is yet to be fully understood, it has led to significant drops in GDP activity in many countries. In Australia, the drop in GDP due to COVID-19 has been estimated to be 7%.

But how has this affected IP activity – particularly in relation to intellectual property rights (IPR) filed in Australia, and filed globally by Australian IP owners?

Mark Summerfield has considered this in relation to patents being filed in Australia in recent blogs, and found a 5% decline, which is in line with the drop in GDP, and the largest fall over a comparable time period since the GFC .  This study is intended to consider more international aspects, if from an Australian perspective, and also to consider registered designs and trade marks.

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Tags: COVID-19, Guest article, Patent analytics

Trials, Tribulations & Settlements – an Analysis of Patent Litigation Data from the Federal Court of Australia

This is a guest contribution from Kelvin Tran of Litimetrics.  Further details about the author can be found at the end of the article.

Since 2010, there have been 472 patent proceedings filed in the Federal Court of Australia.  During the same period, there were over 160,000 standard patents granted, and over 1,400 innovation patents certified.  On those numbers alone, the chance that an applicant or even opponent will be involved in Federal Court litigation is therefore rare.  It’s obvious why - litigation is expensive and lengthy, and litigants, for the most part, are sensible.

Most rights-holders know that litigation only makes sense when the commercial value of the rights to be enforced exceeds the costs of litigation.  But rights-holders often can’t accurately estimate the true costs of litigation.  Litigation therefore also occurs because the parties lack information to make fully informed decisions about whether the value of the rights to be protected outweigh the costs to protect them (i.e. the costs of litigation).  This cuts both ways – those who underestimate the cost and length of litigation might litigate where alternatives make better economic sense, while those who overestimate fail to litigate when it is the optimal strategy.

The source of uncertainty is clear – comprehensive and comprehensible data is not readily available. In this piece, I use data compiled by Litimetrics to look at trends associated with Federal Court patent litigation. I rely on data:

1. that Litimetrics collects about Federal Court patent litigation from electronic court dockets;
2. from IP Australia itself (e.g. via IPGOD and AusPat); and
3. from the published judgments, mined by Litimetrics.

I’ll look at numbers related to the typical duration of proceedings and trials, the various stages that they go through and the proportion of cases that proceed to a final judgment (as opposed to settling). Briefly, the data shows that:

1. 2013 and 2014 were the busiest recent years for patent litigation in Australia;
2. the median duration of patent litigation that proceeds to a trial and final judgment is over three years;
3. cases that settle prior to trial, however, have a median duration of 210 days;
4. many events punctuate typical patent proceedings – directions hearings alone, for example, average over 16 per proceeding; and
5. once the trial is over, litigants can expect to wait a number of months for a decision in a patent case.

All of this is useful information for rights-holders who may be considering the commencement of patent proceedings.

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Tags: Australia, Guest article, Litigation, Patent litigation