Tuesday Shorts

UK Announces "Patent Box" Tax Cut - The UK government has published a new paper outlining details of its corporate tax reform program. The reforms are designed to increase the tax competitiveness of the UK by reducing rates.  One of the features highlighted in the reform include a so-called "patent box" that lowers the tax rate on profits from successful product launches that result from a patent registered and then manufactured in the U.K to 10%, compared with the main corporation tax rate of 28%.  In response, GSK announced that it will be investing $779M for building a new biopharmaceutical manufacturing plant in the UK.

Google Joins Forces With EPO to Provide Translation Services - The EPO and Google have signed a Memorandum of Understanding where the EPO will use Google's machine translation technology to translate patents into the languages of the 38 countries that it serves. In return, it will provide Google with access to its translated patents, enabling Google to optimize its machine translation technology. Google technology will be used to translate patents originating in Europe as well as patents originating in other regions of the world (link).

How Complete is the USPTO Online Search Database?  Despite previous concerns over gaps in the USPTO patent search database, Michael White at the "Patent Librarian's Notebook" blog ran a few quick tests on the PTO's website to see how complete the patent listings were.  What did he find?  The listings are quite complete - out of nearly 4 million documents, he only found a 12 document discrepancy, or % 0.00003.  You can read more about his test and methodologies used here (link).