Insight Our Strategy
In 2020, too, we have pushed ahead with the digitisation of our office. Our digital roadmap provides an overview of the current measures. While some measures are still in the concept stage, others are already being implemented or have been implemented successfully.
We use new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to eliminate any remaining format discontinuities, for example. We are improving and expanding our existing digital services.
All measures of the digital roadmap support our strategic goals in the four fields of action “Products and services”, “Customers”, “Staff” and “Cooperation projects”.
In the field of action “Products and services”, we are further developing the search options. In particular, we want to make the Asian search file to a large extent easily accessible for patent searches and introduce a cognitive search option.
In the “Customers” field of action we will further develop the “DPMAdirekt” and “DPMAregister” databases.
As regards the field “Staff”, we also want to work in a paperless and process-oriented way in our general administrative areas in the future, as is already our practice in the examination areas. To this end, we are pressing ahead with the development of electronic administrative work.
In the field of action “Cooperation projects”, an important focus is on the measure “WIPO communication”, a detailed description of which follows on the next page. A future topic is the provision of an electronic communication platform, which gives legal certainty, for cooperation with applicants as well as with our cooperation partners.
By focusing on these digital solutions, we provide both our applicants and our partner organisations with high-quality and efficient services and tools.
Our Project WIPO communication
With the WIPO communication project, the DPMA meets the request made by many customers for a connection to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s system for the exchange of electronic priority documents (WIPO Digital Access Service). In addition, we intend to optimise the exchange of data with WIPO under the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) procedure.
After the related preliminary study had been completed successfully, we internally assigned the project in November 2020 and thus paved the way for another important element of the development of secure digital communication with our customers. In line with the strategic fields of action “Products and services” and “Cooperation projects” and the digital roadmap, this will make the DPMA a part of the international network for the exchange of priority documents. Apart from avoiding format discontinuity and adjusting the exchange of data to the current state of the art, the measure essentially aims to implement an applicant-friendly and cost- and time-saving process for the application and examination of patents.
In addition to the purely technical tasks to be fulfilled, the project also has to establish the legal framework for the electronic transfer of priority documents. Our legal division has been involved in the project since early 2020 in order to initiate, together with the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, the necessary amendments to laws and ordinances in the years to come.
To establish the connection to WIPO DAS, a new horizontal service for all IP systems is being developed, which initially is primarily intended for patents and utility models. This allows both the DPMA and the applicants a fully electronic exchange without format discontinuity with other international offices via the WIPO interface. For this purpose, the DPMA will store the required priority documents in the DAS library. Applicants receive an access code generated by the DPMA and decide themselves which office they provide with this code and the priority file number and thus grant access to the priority documents. If they subsequently want to claim priority rights from this earlier application in a subsequent application, only the access code has to be provided to the office with which the subsequent application is filed. With a combination of the code and some additional information, such as the priority file number and priority date, the relevant office can retrieve the priority document from the DAS library.
For the purpose of the fastest possible implementation, the connection to WIPO DAS will initially rely on the technical basis of the interface already existing at WIPO. We assume that the service will be available to users in the course of 2022, provided that the legal basis has been established until then. On this basis, in a second step, it is planned to make the conversion into a future-oriented web service interface that is sustainable in the long term.
Another important element of the measure is to fundamentally revise and modernise the exchange of data with WIPO in connection with PCT applications. For example, this concerns the download of WIPO publications, the exchange of payment information and status data or the transmission of file elements and documents. For the purpose of comprehensive process optimisation, the existing individual solutions are combined, aligned with the specifications of WIPO and also converted into modern web services on a step-by-step basis.
The implementation of the entire project is expected to take five years and to be completed by the end of 2025.
Outlook Other ongoing projects and strategic measures
Electronic administrative work
From 2022, we want to start electronic file processing in our administrative areas. To this end, we are optimising our processes and the administration of our records.
This will allow, for example, the staff in our human resources, organisation and legal divisions to work more flexibly and efficiently, regardless of where they are located.
Electronic IP case file for designs
We are working on implementing DPMAdesigns, because we also want to introduce a process-oriented electronic case file for design procedures. For this purpose, we combine the already existing horizontal services with individual solutions.
New search
We are introducing a new IT horizontal service that enables searches in our databases with the help of an up-to-date search engine. We also make available an electronic IPC (International Patent Classification) classifier. In the long term, this will continue to ensure high-quality, widely accepted search results in the case files, in patent literature and in documents from many other data sources.