BLOG@IP::JUR

Patent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.

Disclaimer & About This Website

Visit the archives

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

DKPTO Sold IPscore Software to EPO.

The EPO has recently

reported that they have acquired a software named IPscore originally developed by the

Danish Patent and Trade Mark Office. The EPO will be offering it to national patent offices and their patent information centres for further distribution. The

advertising on the website of the Danish Patent and Trade Mark Office asserts as follows:

"[...] IPscore 2.0 is a unique evaluation tool, developed to provide comprehensive evaluation of patents and technological development projects. IPscore 2.0 is an easy and user-friendly tool that can be used by all businesses with a small or large portfolio of patents and development projects.

IPscore 2.0 provides a broad framework for the evaluation and strategic management of patents and development projects, securing their status as integral components of the business' overall strategic management.

Experience gained from working with the IPscore basic model and the subsequent development phase of IPscore 2.0 shows that this tool can be used for the evaluation of tangible development projects, from the birth of an idea in the IP-management of patents, right through to the expiration of a patent. [...]"

More details are discernible from

these presentation sheets. A user of IPscore has to provide values for some 40 so-called assessment factors for every invention to be processed by the IPscore software. These values are used to produce a lot of diagrams and reports. There appears to be no rigid mathematical model behind those assessment factors. Hence, the answer to the question as to whether or not utilisation of IPscore would make sense mostly depends on the quality of the more or less subjective values entered into the computer running IPscore by the user with regard to the said assessment factors: Garbage in, garbage out.

IPscore 2.0 runs on top of Microsoft Access 2000. I am in doubt as to whether this might count as an advantage. Nevertheless, in former times where the Copyright was at the Danish Patent and Trade Mark Office, the price tag was set to DKK 18.000,-- (roughly equal to EUR 2.400,--) for a version in English. A Danish-only version was sold for DKK 9.950 (roughly equal to EUR 1,325). There is no indication which price will in future be demanded by the EPO.

Technorati Tags:

Patents

[Permalink]