About

Today PatCom (the Patent Committee), has eleven member organisations. The group meet regularly throughout the year, in person and by video call to discuss patent information matters of common interest with the IP Offices and with other members. Over the years PatCom has built a warm relationship with many of the biggest global patent offices, through our in-depth discussions with fellow experts who all care deeply about patent information, sharing expertise to the benefit of all parties. In 2023 we held our first meeting with the Japan Patent Office.

PatCom has Observer Status at WIPO meetings and PatCom members are regularly invited to participate in patent information conferences and WIPO meetings because of the special expertise they bring to the patent information community.

PatCom is an organisation registered in The Netherlands .

PatCom Organisation

The members of the Board of the PatCom are Mr. Paul Peters (CAS) as Chairman, Ms. Amandine Kandi-Masakidi (Questel) as Vice-president, Mr. Robert Fokkema (Lighthouse IP), as Treasurer and Mrs. Yvonne Pope, as the Secretary.

Get in Touch with PatCom

PatCom would welcome expressions of interest from IP Offices who are interested in supplying data to the commercial sector and from those who would like to engage in conversation about IP data.
To find out more about PatCom contact the Secretary in the first instance: yvopope@googlemail.com.

A brief history of PatCom

PatCom was established in 1999, at the EPO EPIDOS conference when the IP offices first began to make patent information more readily available for search via free-to-use internet search engines such as espacenet and PatentScope.

Since that time much has changed, the IP data has grown many times over, and more patent documents are published in Chinese than any other language making prior art search challenging for all. PatCom members and the IP Offices all continue to develop their capabilities including machine translation in bulk for search and on-the-fly- for review of documents. Advances in documents processing including OCR capabilities have enabled members to create advanced data sets for search and analysis.

The IP information market continues to evolve, new platforms, and new capabilities for processing data, and preparation of the repositories for search via machine learning, Natural language processing , Generative AI, and Image processing robotic and AI techniques.
PatCom organisations provide sophisticated search engines with practical workflow solutions for their customers who demand the best.

In a rapidly changing market, users need a healthy balance between free, lower performance public sector sources, and high performance/high added-value commercial services. Contentious issues remain, but the continuing dialogue is essential.