International Co-operations

Aside from the close cooperation with the Hungarian Patent Office, the Austrian Patent Office was also involved in other exciting international projects with other patent offices in the area of industrial property protection:

The initiative “InnovAcess” provides small and medium-sized enterprises as well as universities with information on intellectual property and industrial property protection within the country and abroad. This also includes background information as well as information with regard to procedures and costs in the member states of the EU. The consortium running the project consists of national patent offices of the European Union, the European Patent Office and the Office for Harmonisation on the Internal Market.

The project eMAGE attempts to lay out the often complicated world of trademark and design laws in a more customer friendly way. The platform provides laymen in the area of trademark and designs with the option of carrying out a so-called “natural language” search. What does that mean? The customer enters colloquial terms – and the system identifies the technical terms and then searches for registered trademarks and designs in several languages. This “natural language” search is supplemented by a quick image similarity search. Aside from the national patent offices of Austria, Hungary, Portugal and the Czech Republic, the Chamber of Commerce of Marseille, for example, is also represented in the consortium.

The so-called “Utilisation Pilot Project” (UPP) is an international pilot project that is meant to promote the mutual acceptance of search results between different patent offices and thereby assist in the reduction of patent issuance costs at the European Patent Office. Currently, it is often so that different patent offices perform duplicate searches and as a result also more costs incur for the customers. The patent offices of Denmark, Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom want to change that and increase the efficiency and customer friendliness. The project is promoted explicitly by the European Patent Office and planned to be continued in 2009 as well.