In the light of the above, an article in The Economist was fun to read.

As Carl Oppedahl of e-trademarks-l nicely summarized it:

“DESIGNERS of fancy apparel would like their customers to believe that wearing their creations lends an air of wealth, sophistication and high status. And it does—but not, perhaps, for the reason those designers might like to believe, namely their inherent creative genius. A new piece of research confirms what many, not least in the marketing departments of fashion houses, will long have suspected: that it is not the design itself that counts, but the label.”

I couldn’t say it better in English.

BTW, guys at The Economist produce absolutely fascinating wall calendars – check them out! I got mine in the post couple of weeks ago and it keeps me amused ever since – so much fun to study all those tiny details, it’s always sets me in positive mood

See also:

Here is just a snippet out of this coming revelation

One on the things I enjoy most about my occupation of information professional is communication with people from all corners of the world. I love the feeling of being exposed to new locations – even virtually (I do not travel much

Whenever I happen to get in touch with somebody on a business matter, I always – just out of curiousity – google their whereabouts, and this way become aware of plenty interesting places I never heard about or never seen something about (I rarely watch telly).

Just recently these were Zhuhai in Southern China on Chinese sea searshore and Lower Hutt near Wellington in New Zealand on a seashore, too … I immediately wanted to take a couple of weeks off

From now on I’m going to post pictures of these places on the Photoblog section of the blog. Commentatorss are always welcome !

Kia ora!

PS: speaking about places I never heard about – I bet most of you never heard about the city of Izhevsk where I reside. So here is a couple of pictures for you – enjoy!

Related posts:

• Lower Hutt, New Zealand
• Zhuhai, Southern China
• Gurgaon city, Haryana, India
• Izhevsk city view

This week we received following inquiry from Spanish company:

We are looking for two RU Patents. In case these two documents are available IN ENGLISH, please, let us know the price & conditions of delivery.

As usually, I responded in this manner:

Full texts of Russian patents are never available in English. Available (and not with 100% certainty) are only English abstracts of 1994 – current RU patents.

We can translate these patents for you. We charge $0.12/word
(English), estimated cost of translation is $405 for RU2141655 and $249 for RU2326320.

You’ll pay after receiving the translation.

Client replied:

Unfortunately, I’m afraid that is too much money for us to spend in these documents, asked by a technitian of us.

I believe that my following answer might be of help to somebody, so I’m quoting it here in full.

I thought about your inquiry today, and it appeared to me that there might be a solution for such a case like yours. I take it that your technician just wants to familiarize with the content of the documents. While regular translation cost appears not feasible in this case, he might find use of machine translation – i.g. by Google Translate.

I’ve been using it all the time to get a fast translation of documents in languages I do not understand, and I can tell you what quality of translation got considerably improved over time – I even use it to make a draft translation of short texts from Russian to English (further on I just edit the draft – it indeed saves me a lot of time, it’s faster than to make a text in English from scratch).

As an extra option, you may want to proof edit this machine translated text either by hiring a freelance translator (i.g. via ProZ – consider $0.03/word rate) or via One Hour Translation (they charge $0.15 for Expert translation of legal, medical, technical etc. texts – that’s there patents generally fall – but proof-editing service costs $0.05/word).

Main advantage of One Hour Translation over ProZ is speed of translation – the name of the service shows it, they make it a point to provide translation in a matter of hours.

Another advantage of OHT type service over ProZ service is what freelancers found at ProZ might complain that proofediting of machine translated text actually means translating the given text anew (I know it for sure – I’ve been into translation services for ages) – on the contrary, regular freelancers from One Hour Translation won’t complain.

Of course, the drawback is lesser quality at OHT – but in this case I believe it’d be sufficient, your technician will be able to understand the text, and being a professional in this field he will understand what exactly translator (editor) got wrong or missed – and your technician will guess upon vague moments.

At least such a cost effective solution might pass as a temporary solution – if he sees what the document is worth further – professional – translation, you could always proceed with more thorough translation.

That said, I can provide text copies of those Russian patents which will be suitable for feeding them into Google Translate.

—
[Source: Russian Patents blog]

Related posts:

• Comprehensive search in Russian patent and non-patent literature
• Russian patents in English language
• Latest news on Russian patent search, translation and document detective joys
• Feb 15th: portfolio of Russian patent translations updated
• Translating Chemistry: Poor translation is costly

Among recently filed trademarks are ones from
China (2 marks), Israel (2 marks), Indonesia, New Zealand (2 marks), South Korea (2 marks), Ireland, Thailand and Argentina.

And recently there were quite a few requests for trademark search in Russia originating from Japanese companies – I wonder whether it’s a sign of future expansion of Japanese companies into Russian market? They’d have to compete with Chinese though – because most of inquiries come from China.

Related posts:

• (Updated) quick guide to trademark registration in Russia in 2009
• Report: Foreign Trade Mark Registrations in Russia by Country and Companies for Two Months of 2008
• Russian TM watch service – 2 weeks of February
• A quick guide to trademark registration in Russia
• New “trademark registration in Russia” and “Document delivery service” pages

It’s thrilling to be listed – just above the Securing Innovation blog (by alphabetical order).

I just feel like putting entire list into our blog’s sidebar (just below link to yet2.com) – cause it’s a valuable selection of useful resources with a human face to it

Kudos to Gene for compiling it!

Related posts:

• Russian patents in English – cheaper than usual?
• Comprehensive search in Russian patent and non-patent literature
• Russian patents in English language
• Testimonials page updated
• Latest news on Russian patent search, translation and document detective joys

We’ve finished another Russian patent prior art search project back in mid-June, and I feel like saying couple of words about it.

The order was placed with us by a large US IP company, and the only concern they had was about project turnaround.

Usually it takes us about 2 weeks per IPC subclass. We cannot speed it up.

(Updated on April 3rd, 2009: we can do it much faster now – currently full search is completed within a week)

Indeed, it’s quite lengthy.

That’s why our client asked:

Are your searches done manually or do you use a search engine against databases? Why will take almost 2 months ?
In contrast, a typical search of the US and EU patent literature takes about 7 days at the longest.

And our answer was:

Pre-1994 Russian patents are not available for keyword research -
while RUPTO database does contain these pre-1994 documents, they are
just TIFFs, images of scanned documents, so good deal of prior art
search is manual process, hence the lengthy delivery time.

To leverage the lengthy delivery time, first we search in documents which are available
online and after that do the search in pre-1994 patents manually, and we I’ll be sending
interim results as we uncover relevant patents.

If we are unable to find relevant references, we provide an interim summary report describing search strategy and the queries used.

Read more about Russian patent prior art search service at our site.

Related posts:

• Comprehensive search in Russian patent and non-patent literature
• First-To-File vs First-to-Invent explained, quite nicely

Portfolio of Russian to English scientific translations????????: we’ve added translations of two Russian scientific articles, this time in the field of Electrical Engineering.

Portfolio of Russian scientific journals search: another two Russian scientific articles found and delivered to our patron.

See also:

Related posts:

• Russian patent search trends
• Translating Chemistry: Poor translation is costly
• Russian patents in English – cheaper than usual?
• The top patent blogs list
• Comprehensive search in Russian patent and non-patent literature

This is a hot topic currently in Russia due to new Intellectual Property Rights Law to come in effect as of January 1, 2008.

A solution lies in compilation of a classification system for nanotechnological products. State officials also point at the necessity of performing thorough and complex safety studies of products and materials, used in and produced by means of nanotechnologies. The rest of the world also lacks a complete solution for this problem.

Another burning issue is protection of developers’ rights, solving which will make a great contribution to innovation economy. Latest amendments to nanotech legislation regulate federal technologies and Russian patent attorneys.

Source: Izvestia Nauki (in Russian)

See also:

Q: I would like to know whether you are able to provide copies of Russian file histories (file wrapper), showing the documents filed at the Russian Patent Office, correspondence between the applicant/office and details of examination procedures.

If you can provide such documents, can you please give me an indication of the costs and timescales involved?

A: No, we do not provide such a service, due to the fact that Russian
patent office does not disclose such a data to third parties.

See also: