Monday miscellany

Do you enjoy classifying patents? And are you tempted to offer some feedback. If so, from our reader Yegor Smurnyy comes the following message:

"I am a machine learning researcher and have created Patent Classifier -- a new patent search tool that automatically suggests an appropriate United States Patent and Trademark Office patent classification based on user's input. I plan to keep the tool free (I earn money by contracting and use it as a portfolio item), I do not store/analyze/sell user input and/or contact details, and there are no ads. I estimate the accuracy to be in the 80-90% range, depending on the subject matter, and the initial feedback from the few patent attorneys I've shown this to has been extremely positive". 

Yegor welcomes more users and some community feedback. If you would like to try Patent Classifier for yourself, feel free to do so. You can post comments below or email Yegur here.

Around the weblogs. Following the Spanish Supreme Court decision in DENSO (noted on the IPKat here and on Class 46 here), Fidel Porcuna has added a further post on Class 46 which looks at some of the facts and issues behind the issues arising from this dispute. Design law Class 99 meanwhile reminds us that the "informed user" of dog biscuits is not the dog but the person who selects the biscuits.  On the 1709 Blog, Ben Challis's awesome review of the copyright year has already attracted oodles of attention, deservedly so.


No guarantee, but a welcome step in the right direction.  The following notice, spotted by Chris Torrero (Katpat!), appears on the website of Spain's IP office which reads as follows:

The Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (SPTO) is offering a new service to citizens and Industrial Property professionals [Miaow, says Merpel: why "citizens" first? And what about people who are not citizens or IP professionals?] that will allow them to easily search for and access recent rulings that meet a set of criteria defined by the user.  

Legal notice  

The Spanish Patent and Trademark Office provides a public database of court rulings related to industrial property. The Spanish Patent and Trademark Office does not guarantee permanent availability or the continuity of the case law database [no, says Merpel, she doesn't suppose that any such guarantee is forthcoming but then, to be honest, she wasn't expecting one ...], and reserves the right to suspend access to same or to part of its contents at any time and without prior notification, whether due to technical, security, maintenance or for any other reason. Nor does the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office guarantee that all the information contained in the case law database is trustworthy, as provision of same on the SPTO website is purely for information purposes [can anyone tell Merpel if, in the absence of all these cautions and disclaimers, the SPTO would actually be legally liable?].

You can do your searching here -- but do remember not to rely on it, just in case ...