Cloem is a company based in
Cannes
Cannes ( , , ; oc, Canas) is a city located on the French Riviera. It is a commune located in the Alpes-Maritimes department, and host city of the annual Cannes Film Festival, Midem, and Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. T ...
, France, which applies
natural language processing (NLP) technologies to assist patent applicants in creating variants of
patent claims, called "cloems".
According to the company, these "computer-generated claims can be published to keep potential competitors from attempting to file adjacent patent claims."
[
]
Technology
According to Cloem, dictionaries, ontologies
In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains ...
and proprietary claim-drafting algorithms are used to draft alternative claims based on a client's original set of claims.[ In particular, the original set of claims is subject to various permutations and linguistic manipulations] "by considering alternative definitions for terms as well as “ synonyms, hyponym
In linguistics, semantics, general semantics, and ontologies, hyponymy () is a semantic relation between a hyponym denoting a subtype and a hypernym or hyperonym (sometimes called umbrella term or blanket term) denoting a supertype. In other ...
s, hyperonyms, meronym
In linguistics, meronymy () is a semantic relation between a meronym denoting a part and a holonym denoting a whole. In simpler terms, a meronym is in a ''part-of'' relationship with its holonym. For example, ''finger'' is a meronym of ''hand' ...
s, holonym
In linguistics, meronymy () is a semantic relation between a meronym denoting a part and a holonym denoting a whole. In simpler terms, a meronym is in a ''part-of'' relationship with its holonym. For example, ''finger'' is a meronym of ''hand' ...
s, and antonyms.”"
Possible uses
Cloem can optionally publish one or more created texts, as electronic publications or as paper-printed publications. These can potentially serve – through a defensive publication
A defensive publication, or defensive disclosure, is an intellectual property strategy used to prevent another party from obtaining a patent on a product, apparatus or method for instance. The strategy consists in disclosing an enabling descriptio ...
– as prior art
Prior art (also known as state of the art or background art) is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria ...
to prevent another party for obtaining a patent on the subject-matter at stake.[ In other words, after an initial patent filing, an "improvement" patent (adjacent invention) can be applied for by another party, such as a competitor. By publishing variants of a patent claim, the risk of adverse patenting may potentially be decreased (improvement inventions may no longer be ]patentable
Within the context of a national or multilateral body of law, an invention is patentable if it meets the relevant legal conditions to be granted a patent. By extension, patentability also refers to the substantive conditions that must be met for ...
).
Cloems may also be potentially patentable. One of the issues of patentability, however, is that only a natural person can be a listed as an inventor on a patent. Since cloems are produced by a computer based on a person's input, it is not clear if the computer or the person is the inventor. The inventorship of Cloem texts is an open question.[
]
References
Service companies of France
Patent law
Natural language processing
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