patent

　On October 26, 2020, Japan’s Prime Minister Suga (at that time) declared in his policy speech to the Diet, “We aim to achieve a carbon neutral, decarbonized society by 2050”. This declaration was also extended to the Japan Business Federation. Now, a year and a half after October 2020, I checked the published gazettes to verify whether the number of patent applications related to carbon neutrality surged along with this declaration.
　I searched the Patent Information Platform (J-PlatPat) for the number of gazettes containing the term “carbon neutral” in the specification by year of application, and found the following results (as of May 31, 2022).

　Already in 2001, there were applications with the term “carbon neutral” in the specification. For example, in Japanese Patent Publication 2003-129058, it is stated that “Biomass, in particular, is carbon neutral and should be actively used to replace petroleum, coal, etc., in order to fulfill the international commitments made at the Kyoto Conference on Climate Change Prevention (COP3).” This seems to reflect the growing interest in global warming and climate change triggered by the Kyoto Protocol of December 1997.
　Subsequently, the number of applications describing the term “carbon neutral” increased, but peaked in 2009 (the year COP15 was held in Copenhagen) and has been declining since then, with a leveling off trend since around 2015. Incidentally, the Paris Agreement, which sets reduction targets for each member country, was adopted at COP21 in 2015. As of the end of October to the first half of November 2020, when Prime Minister Suga’s declaration was made as introduced at the beginning of this report, there was no particular upward trend in applications.
　I hope that many carbon neutral related inventions will be created for the future global environment. (Conan)

There is a TV program that introduces the work and life of the people who TV crew visited at the location and revisit them after a few years. Following that method, this time, I will inform you about what happened to the patent for “multicolor penlight” (Japanese patent publication No. 5608827, registered on September 5, 2014) introduced in my blog six years ago (December 16, 2015).

This patent was filed with trial for invalidation of a patent on March 19, 2019, five years after registration on the ground of inventive step. The patentee, TurnON co.,ltd., corrected claims 1 and 2, but the JPO stated that “this invention could easily be come up with by those skilled in the art based on the technical matters and well-known techniques described in Exhibit A1 and Exhibit A2” and on July 28, 2020, an invalidation decision was made. In response, the patentee filed a lawsuit to revoke the trial decision in the Intellectual Property High Court.

On October 6, 2021, the Intellectual Property High Court ruled that the trial decision made by the JPO had an error in finding the subject of the invention of Exhibit No. 1 and decided to revoke the trial decision. As this decision was finalized, the JPO ruled on January 13, 2022 that the Patent was not invalid.
After all the twists and turns, the patent has survived. The “multicolor penlight”, which is the target product of this patent, is also posted on the TurnON website. (Conan)
Link
https://turnon.co.jp/patent/ (Japanese Only)

This is swimmer.
In the calligraphy class I attended when I was little, at the occasion of first writing of the year, we used to make ink by rubbing solid inkstick on the inkstone instead of using commercially available ink.
It is often watery even after rubbing it many times, and I remember having a hard time because it did not have the ideal concentration and stickiness.
Every year when New Year time comes, I feel grateful for the convenience of the ink that can be used immediately after pouring it from the container into the inkstone.
The ink was patented in Japan in 1893.

Inkstick – Wikipedia

“Maruchan Seimen” by from TOYO SUISAN KAISHA, LTD. is one of my favorite instant noodles because the noodles taste good.

The package says it employs “the special manufacturing method for keeping raw noodles delicious” and the Japanese patent number was written on the back.

When I looked it up, this patent has been granted under the accelerated examination scheme. After the patent was granted, NISSIN FOODS HOLDINGS CO., LTD. became the claimant and filed a trial for invalidation for this patent. The claim 1 was accepted as invalid, but appeal for the claims 2 to 10 were not considered invalid so the patent right was vested. In addition, divisional applications based on this case have been filed up to the 4th generation, and all of them have been registered. Furthermore, an international application has been filed as a PCT application with the Japanese application as the basic application.

When I learned that the ramen noodles I ate casually was supported by the technology protected by making full use of the patent system, I felt that it was more delicious than ever. (Marron)

When a year and a half is passed since the filing of a patent application, a publication bulletin is issued, and everyone can know the contents of the application. It was on January 16, 2020 that the first infection of the new coronavirus was confirmed in Japan. After that, the latter half of January and February 2020 was the beginning of the Corona disaster. A patent from just that time has recently been published. (As of September 16, 2021, patent applications with filing dates up to around March 6, 2020 have been published, with exceptions such as early publication.)

So, I checked to see if there were any patent applications that were the first to describe terms such as “Three Cs,” “Social Distance,” “refrain from going out,” “stay home,” and “unnecessary and nonurgent,” which have come to be used a lot in the Corona disaster, but I could not find any. Based on the tendency of utility model bulletins to be published within three or four months of filing, we can guess that corona-related terms began to be included in application specifications probably from applications filed around April 2020.

So, when I was looking at the search screen to see what applications had been filed around February 2020, I happened to see an application by GURUNAVI INC. for “information processing system, information processing method, and program”. GURUNAVI INC. is a company that operates the GURUNAVI website, which accepts restaurant reservations and delivery orders.

https://gurunavi.com/

GURUNAVI INC. has been consistently filing patent applications related to information processing for some time now; from 2017 to 2019, the company filed about 70 applications per year, an average of 5 to 6 per month. In contrast, I was curious to see that 12 applications were filed in the month from January 23 to February 21, 2020, which is double the average of the previous year. It may not be directly related to Corona, but was there any strategy behind it? I can only guess now, a year and a half later, that each company must have been thinking of various strategies in the early days of the Corona disaster. (Conan)