In Russia also there appear now many patents that might be called 'submarine' ones, because they were filed many years ago and emerged only recently. Among those patent there a few that were persued for about 4-5 years or even longer. But for the majority of the newly published patents the reasons for their appearence are different.
The process of economic reforms under way in Russia greatly affect the patent information situation. On the one hand, the number of patent applications filed by national applicants in the last years decreased dramatically. In late 80-ties about 150,000 patent applications were filed with the USSR patent office and about 85,000 patent documents on average were issued annually. Now in late 90-ties the activity of the nationals is almost three times less and there are about 35,000 patents granted each year. On the other hand new documents not known before appeared. In the Soviet Union there existed a developed multi-level system of secrecy of various information sources and this was applied to patent documentation also. A substantial part of patent documents were not published openly; those patents that bore the legend "For employee usage" could be accessed only by employees of Soviet state enteprises upon submission of a special request from the administration of the enterprise. Democratization process under way in the former Soviet Union affected patent information also. Now some portion of patent documents formerly unpublished for various reasons become available to the public. During the last several years there emerged many patent documents registered long ago but previousely not known to the public and now they might be of great interest to the parties of a patent infringement proceedings all over the world.
Yes, there are many submarine patents, but how many? The best thing to do is just take all the Patent Office bulletins published in
recent years, open the special Chapter "Patents, not published before" and count all the newly
published documents.
But we thought better of it and just took to work with the CD-ROM data base on Russian
patents published in the years 1994-1996. This CD has been not long ago issued by the Russian Patent Information Institute. The task was to determine
the breakdown of the published patents by years of filing applications.
The results are in Table 1.
YEAR OF FILING No. of Patents before 1980 1063 1980 344 } 1981 347 } 1982 503 } 1983 599 } 1984 833 } Total 13060 1985 981 } 1986 1299 } 1987 1806 } 1988 2385 } 1989 3963 } 1990 8849 1991 20667 1992 30267 1993 36649 1994 24819 1995 5403 1996 120TOTAL Published in 1994-96 140867
All in all there have been published about 140,000 patents.
In the first half of 1997 published were about 1,000 patents filed before 1 January 1991.
As it is seen from the table now it is possible to obtain a patent in Russia even within one year. There have been 120 such patents filed in the beginning and granted in the end of 1996. And 5403 patents obtained within less than two years seem not too bad. However, the average patent procedure takes about three years and a half given the three year term for filing request for substantial examination from the national filing date.
The gap between the year 1989 and 1991 is clearly seen - it makes about 16,000 documents. Most certainly, patents filed in 1991 and later have been processed under usual procedure, though due to some reasons the examination of a part of them was rather long.
Patents of 1990 might be of dual nature: among them there mignt be quite a few formely unpublished ones and a good number of those processed under usual patent procedure. But the greatest majority of patents filed before 1990 are most certainly formerly unpublished documents, they emerged now because of relieving of their 'unpublishable' status.
These documents could not have been taken into account in the patent examination process and thus pose a threat to the world patents. Also we may suppose that at least one third of the total amount of patents filed in 1990 were also published later than the usual standard term.
Thus, we may state, that now there have been at least fifteen thousand Russian submarine patents emerged in the last three years. These patents, as well as the associated scientific papers, describe the leading edge technologies of the 80-ties. They were published recently, but they actually date back to 1980-ies. These documents could not have been taken into account in the patent examination processes and they might pose a serious threat to the world patentees. And whenever there is a prospective of a patent infringement suit or even a patent license deal, it is highly advisable to look through the Russian patents, especially the newly emerging ones.
If you choose to do it, send a message to: patsgr@online.ru