In Brief – Database news
The commercial data bank Darts-IP, based in Belgium, is widening its scope. At present, it contains about 140.000 trade mark decisions by national and EU courts and registering authorities. The operators have, however, started to include decisions concerning patents, utility models and domain names, too. The fairly comprehensive trade mark database can be used by examiners and boards of appeals as well as trade mark attorneys to consider if a certain mark might be considered void of distinctiveness or confusable. As it could also benefit a student making a thesis on IPR, Darts-IP can grant temporary access for students.
See: www.darts-ip.com
In Finland, the decisions of the National Board of Patents and registration (NBPR) and its Board of Appeals have not been available in a public database. A working group at NBPR is constructing a database on these decisions. Its first public version is expected to be on the Internet at the end of this year. During the next two years, there will also be changes in NBPR’s activities. The tasks of the Board of Appeals will be transferred to the Market Court in 2012. This implies, among other things, that two different publishing policies and systems must be combined.
At the end of 2009, the case law database of IPR University Center OIKKU contained nearly 800 IPR-related decisions of Finnish courts, mostly in summaries. The institute has made a cooperation agreement with the commercial databank operator Edilex. They are allowed to use the summaries in the case law databases of Edilex referring those needing a copy of entire decision to contact the Institute.
During 2010, the customers of Dialog will see big changes in their databases: Dialog and DataStar databases will be combined with sources from the ProQuest full-text collection. The new platform is expected to be available through a series of releases. Dialog’s intellectual property collection has also been developed further, including databases for prior art, a new version of Innography tool integrating trademark data.
See: www.dialog.com (in Finland: www.merilkon.fi ).
Darts-ip is a service provider for Intellectual Property (IP) professionals, offering a good overview of European IP case law, particularly trade marks. Services relating to other areas of IP are being developed.
The databases of Dialog include e.g. articles and reports, newspapers, market research reports, repositories of scientific and technical data, patents, trademarks and other intellectual property data. Additional content areas include government regulations, social sciences, food and agriculture, reference, energy and environment, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and medicine.
