Study on the differences between the classification symbols of US patents under parallel IPC and CPC systems

• Main Authors: Chin-Yuan Chang, 張晉源
• Other Authors: Chung-Huei Kuan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/2w68fb

碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 專利研究所 === 107 === Since 2015, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have abandoned their respective European Patent Classification (ELCA) and US Patent Classification (USPC) and begin to adopt a new classification system-Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC), but still provide the International Patent Classification (IPC) currently used by most countries. In view of the fact that patent analysts often use US patents and IPC classification symbols as the basis for technical analysis, the main purpose of this study is to compare the differences between the two patent classification systems applied to the US patents. Therefore, this study collects 318,829 utility patents issued by USPTO in 2017 and compares differences on the third-level, fourth-level, and fifth-level-and-below IPC and CPC classification symbols of these utility patents according to practical patent classification analysis methods. This study finds that there are certain differences between IPC and CPC classification symbols when the classification symbols are simplified to their third-level or fourth-level parts. This means that when analyzing US patents, it is meaningful to distinguish the IPC or CPC classification symbols. Then, the study further finds that, even though CPC has more third-level and fourth-level classification symbols than IPC, but US patents on the average have more different third-level or fourth-level IPC symbols than their CPC symbols. US patents have a more centralized phenomenon in terms of their CPC symbols than their IPC symbols. Therefore, it seems that, for the analysis of the patent classification symbols, CPC seems to be a better choice for higher-level classification symbols. The contribution of this study lies in that it provides an objective assessment on the validity of IPC or CPC classification symbols when conducting patent data mining and analysis. The findings of this study may help technology analyses, whether they are about patent search, prediction of technology development trends, and exploration of technology diffusion paths, to obtain more accurate and reliable results.