At a meeting held on December 9, 2014, with members of the National Association of Research for Innovative Companies (ANPEI), the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) announced the development of a new online search platform for patent documents filed in Brazil.
Entitled E-Buscas [E-Search], the platform will include written material and audio-visual resources to provide users with appropriate training and access to search for documents in the PTO databases. It will include basic and advanced tutorials, video-lessons, and a new search tool whose main objective is to be more user-friendly and versatile than the current PTO website. It will include several additional search fields and parameters and will allow the user to have immediate access to already published cases (thereby eliminating the present need to access the European Patent Office website, where all the available documentation is stared online).
The most interesting aspect of this "innovation" is the concern of the PTO with the end user. This has resulted in the PTO seeking the participation of the companies and offices that are specialized in intellectual property in the process of experimentation and validation of the tool, before making it definitively available to the public. Accordingly, in the next few weeks, members of the Intellectual Property Committee of ANPEI can access the platform and use it freely to evaluate the effectiveness of the system and the available fields, and provide their opinion with respect to changes or improvements that may be considered necessary. This is a demonstration that one of the main objectives of the PTO is to attend its users effectively and in the best possible manner.
In the aforementioned meeting, it was frequently said that the PTO believes that "partnership is crucial in order to define the focus" of future projects and actions and those in development. With these new partnerships, visions and strategies, expectations are increased for a much more promising future, both for the PTO and for its users.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
