INPI, the Internet and electronic commerce

The information society has always raised important social, economic and cultural issues for our country. In the early days, Minitel was a major factor in user awareness and education in France. Internet-based technologies then offered the ergonomics and user-friendliness expected by a wide section of the public, both French-speaking and otherwise. Our task of disseminating industrial property information, which is a public service, was therefore facilitated by the fact that access was quick and easy and was available anywhere in the world seven days a week and 24 h a day. I - The patents web www.inpi.fr/brevets and esp@cenet: In order to reach as many members of the public as possible and as part of the esp@cenet project, since September 1998 the patents web www.inpi.fr/brevets has been offering access in French to the past two years of FR, EP and PCT publications, the full text of FR applications and a link to esp@cenet. Although the request forms seem simple, not every Internet user understands what professionals like ourselves mean by publication number, priority, filing, inventors, applicants or IPC code. The patents web www.inpi.fr/brevets therefore offers an added-value service, namely the natural-language search engine CIB-LN (in English this would be IPC-NL). This extremely powerful engine enables all French-speaking Internet users to identify the relevant patent classification codes in French using their own words, and to search with the utmost efficiency on the Net using both the patents web www.inpi.fr/brevets and any other patents sites which accept IPC entries. This achievement is currently the subject of a study of the transferability of the natural language search engine into other languages. We are currently experiencing the fourth commercial and marketing revolution, in the shape of electronic commerce. The first revolution involved the emergence of fairs in the Middle Ages, the second the establishment of department stores in the late 19th century, and the third the introduction of volume retailing in the 1950s. Electronic commerce therefore poses a major challenge to any private or public company. Marketing estimates and forecasts indicate that information marketing services will be among the most successful. INPI certainly hopes to take up this challenge. II - INPI shop: Our shop, which is in the process of being set up, will combine information marketing services with: - trade mark priority and French Commercial and Companies Register (RNCS) searches; - copies of patents; - strategic and competitor information search (RISC) services; - historical background; - BREF, COSMOS, GLOBALPAT and RXN CD-ROMs; - official publications. The success and viability of an Internet shop is directly proportional to its links to other shops or service sites. It is therefore quite obvious that the INPI shop will be linked to direct INPI search systems (the patents, trade marks and companies webs) and to any other search service or shop which would like to be linked to it.