Minutes : Patent Applications Review Group

Attendees: Sai Phanindra, Ansh, Shree
26 Nov, 10 AM

This was our first meeting as a group today. This was a follow-up from the policy volunteers call.

Minutes:

  • Group is warming upto the task. Ansh had exams mostly. Sai and Shree are in the Takshashila GCPP Tech Policy course. Some background study has been done. We have been through material shared by Venky. All of us are have used the search feature on Indian Patent Website.
  • Shree passed on doc shared by Venky - Three part test of the Computer Related Inventions Guidelines (Software Patents)
  • Website quirk - patent search result for the past 3 weeks yields 0 results !
  • November appears to have been a lean month - just 43 patents published
  • Sai - can we find software patents using classification G06 (found from WIPO). We tried search - it didn’t work
  • Shree - best to download patents, and search and analyse offline. Have created a method to download patents from website. This will make it easier to search. Demoed a quick search based on grep on a locally downloaded patent database. We searched using G06 on this - worked much better. We were then able to search the database with the application number. Shared his recent blog post capturing some findings based on patent database. Patents contain info identifying inventors and institutions. Emphasised the need to focus on issues impacting the system, and not on individuals/institutes.
  • Sai setup a small telegram group between the three of us for coordination and quick shares
  • Sai’s availability is limited this month. Till-mid Dec we expect less activity due to GCPP final exam.

Next steps:

  • Get familiar with reading and identifying software patents.
  • Go over patents on a weekly basis, create simple reports
  • Implement better automation (time frame of a few months)
  • Can we use AI to find software patents ? (road map)

Action items:

  • Shree to share patent download method with Sai.
  • Next meeting after a week
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Thanks for getting this process of reviewing software patents started. This will help us immensely in the long run by providing us with detailed evidence.

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