IN MARCH this year, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), in cooperation with the Indian government and the Confederation of Indian Industry, held a Asian regional seminar on the better use of patent information by industry. According to a paper presented at the seminar by Jean-Michel Ziliox of the European Patent Office (EPO), 30 per cent of the cost of developing new products and innovations can be saved if patent documentation is used.

In the not too distant future, Indian industrialists and researchers will need only a fax or computer to obtain information on patents from around the world. All they need is to get in touch with the Indian Patent Office in Nagpur, where a revamped and upgraded Patent Information System (PIS) is due to become operational by the end of the year.

The PIS modernisation project, launched in 1992 by WIPO, United Nations Development Programme and the government of India, will equip it with updated patent documents and modern gadgets like CD-ROMs for information collection, storage, retrieval and dissemination. EPO has already developed a CD-ROM package called ESPACE-INDIA, which stores 500 Indian patent specifications published in the first three months of 1991.

Before the advent of computers, links between patent offices across the world were few and the passage of information tediously slow. For example, the Indian patent office had to acquire microfiches or films before an individual could look at them. Now, users can print out documents retrieved from master computers at patent offices either directly or through the PIS.

However, the use of patent documentation has been limited and full of misconceptions. Up to 90 per cent of the world's technical knowledge is stored in patent offices but sorting them out is expensive and not easy. In addition, most researchers are biased towards scientific journals for information and believe -- wrongly -- that patent information cannot be obtained without legal hassles.