Wednesday, December 16, 2009

OST reclassification vs H04W

This post is the result of a joint effort of Emmanuelle Fortune (OST), Lorenzo Cassi (CES) and Francesco Lissoni (KITeS) who gave the solution. I just raised the question.

I asked those guys a help since OST reclassification of IPC codes is not containing H04W class, that comes with patstat 2009/10.

UPto now only @EPo ypou can find 9023 patents with H04W and more than 50.000 worldwide.

The group H04W has been introduced into the IPC-8 only with the version January 2009 (2009.01). As with the IPC-8 system also old documents are re-classified, by using a PATSTAT edition 2009 or later you will find out that also documents from 2008 backwards carry the classificaiton H04W in the databases (see FI EP1685687) , but when you look on the printed document on Espacenet you will not find the symbol there. Also, in case where a patent has been published before 2009 as an application and then granted after 2009, then indeed you will see a difference in the published classification, but in the database you should find that both have the more uptodate on (H04W).

The H04W used to be H04L, H04Q, H04B... H04Q, H04B are in the field Telecommunications and H04L in Digital communication.

So H04W could fall under Telecommunications or Digital communication.

Ulli Schmoch defines "Digital Communications" as follows:
"Digital communication: in the ISI-OST-INPI classification, this field was part of telecommunications. At present, it is a self-contained technology at the border between telecommunications and computer technology. A core application of this technology is the Internet"

While telecommunication is huge (G08C, H01P, H01Q, H04B, H04H, H04J, H04K, H04M, H04N-001, H04N-007, H04N-011, H04Q), Digital communication is made only of H04L

So, in the absence of a more accurate judgement, we decided to keep H04W in Telecommunications, both because Digital Communications is almost a "residual" class and because any mistake would be less noticeable if we dilute HO4W in a big class instead of a small one. Finally, by taking a look at examples of patents with H04W IPC code, their title do not seem to place them squarely into the Internet realm.

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