USPTO officials met with their counterparts from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Japan Patent Office (JPO) in Kyoto this week for the 30th annual Trilateral Conference. After reflecting on their achievements to date, the delegates signed a declaration pledging their renewed commitment to promote further development of and collaboration between patent offices around the world.

"The massive working effort that we have made together to drive forward worldwide common acquisition and exchange of data has been instrumental in building the search and examination systems we have today," EPO president Benoit Battistelli said. "We started by scanning published patents from all over Europe, the U.S. and Japan and moved on to capturing and translating abstracts of the First Page database, and now we are exchanging and making searchable citations from all parts of the procedure."

One of the most widely appreciated innovations has been the establishment and continuous updating of the Common Citation Document. This dynamic resource allows patent offices to build off one another's work by providing online access to patent search results for the same invention as they become available.

Moving forward, European delegates will continue pursuing a unified patent court for the continent, while the U.S. and Japan reach out to other nations to demonstrate the value and functionality of innovations such as the Global Dossier.