Common Citation Document Launched By Trilateral Patent Offices
This posting came with a set of presentation slides which you can find at the end of the post.
The Industry Trilateral (of which IPO is a member) initially proposed a Common Citation Document (CCD). In response, the Trilateral have launched an electronic capability which consolidates access to citation data from the Trilateral Offices combining a priority-based family of patent applications with the cited prior art for each family application. It is possible to enter the database by means of application numbers or patent numbers and obtain a listing of the entire patent family filed in the Trilateral Patent Offices, as well as all of the other offices that send information to the European Patent Office database. Together with each of these applications is included the citations cited against that application in that particular country, as well as its applicable status as X, Y, A, etc. For certain offices such as the European Patent Office and others, the data includes “enhanced information”, including particular sections of the citation that are relevant and the particular claims against which those citations are relevant. This is the typical information in the Search Reports provided under the PCT. The USPTO and JPO are planning in the near future to include such “enhanced information” in their reporting of the citations to this CCD.
The CCD is available under http://www.trilateral.net/ccd As part of the searching capabilities, one can click on particular applications or citations and obtain the full citation. The program also organizes citations cited by various patent offices where a corresponding part of the citation family was cited in different patent offices, to let the user know that it is the same reference cited in various forms by different patent offices. Numerous other capabilities are provided, making this an extremely useful tool for obtaining all references cited against a particular family of patents around the world. For users, the information will only be available after the 18 month publication of the application itself. However, the database will also be usable by examiners and will be containing citations as soon as they are cited by an examiner, so that access to prosecution search results will be available online to examiners from other of the Trilateral Patent Offices.
It is planned to continuously enhance the database with additional features as well as extending the database to an IP5 level by including Korea and China into this project. Ultimately, it is hoped that this database will be able to point out usable IDS documents. Attached for your further information is a PowerPoint presentation presented by the Trilateral Patent Offices at the meeting held November 9, 2011.
We encourage all of you to try using this database, and we look forward to feedback and suggested enhancements that we can forward to the Trilateral Offices for further improvements of this CCD project.
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