"Green grow the patents, Oh"

The IPKat is grateful to his distinguished friend Richard Gallafent for drawing his attention to the fact that a link to the UK Intellectual Property Office's "green patent database" has now been posted, here.

Right: the IPO is hoping to cultivate a new generation of green inventors ...

Richard notes the curious current distribution of green patents by country of residence of their proprietors. Of the 100 published applicationss in the database so far, the breakdown is:

United Kingdom 82
United States 11
Denmark 2

with the balance coming in the form of single patents from Spain, Hong Kong, Ireland, Singapore and Mauritius. One possible reason for this is that the UK IPO has not managed to sell this excellent service overseas very well so far -- or perhaps innovators from major inventing countries such as Japan and Germany are quietly using the Green Channel as an exceptional value for money, high-speed evaluation tool and then quietly withdrawing the applications before publication. There may be other explanations. Says Richard, "it will be interesting to see what the balance looks like in a few month's time, when the publications start to occur in cases where green channel processing was sought on filing; apart from early published ones, they will emerge from November 2010 onwards".

Other green patents ...
Green tea patents here and here

Green tyre patent here
Green chlorination of silver patent here

Green liquor for use in ethanol production here