The 1 million digitised files milestone was achieved on 7 July 2021 at the Finnish Patent and Registration Office (PRH). The total number of digitised pages stands now at approximately 18 million.
The ECP5 Capture and Store Historical Files is a European Cooperation Project that aims to digitise paper dossiers across EU intellectual property (IP) offices to enable easy and rapid access to documentation and data related to trade marks and designs.
In the last 5 years, 11 national IP offices have participated in the digitisation project, including the Finnish Patent and Registration Office. Other offices like the Industrial Property Office of the Slovak Republic (SKIPO) have just recently joined.
This achievement is a result of the work of the implementation teams in Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovenia, Slovakia and Finland, as well as the EUIPO.
A bit of history
The first group of IP offices started digitisation in 2017. At that time the European Union Intellectual Property Network (EUIPN) had limited experience with big data analytics and machine learning. Today these barriers no longer exist and the Network is making the most of these new technologies to input and manage big volumes of high-quality data.
But the ECP5 project does not stand on its own. Its results, geographical coverage and data have been instrumental for other European Cooperation Projects such as IMAS, Decision Desktop, and the Case Law Repository, as well as for established search tools like TMview and DesignView.