Eiji Katayama released statistics at the Fifteenth Annual Conference on International Intellectual Property Law & Policy at Fordham University. In 2006, 33 of 37 trial rulings were in favor of defendants in Tokyo and Osaka district courts. Of the 33 patent-holding plaintiff losses, two-thirds (22) were invalidated, with 85% of the invalidations owed to obviousness or lack of an inventive process step.

Prof. Tetsuya Obuchi, Professor of Law at Tokyo University, noted that many of the currently litigated patents were granted years ago, when patentability standards were considerably lower.

Katayama pointed out a disparity in claim construction methods used for infringement analysis versus anticipation. Alas, a test case before the Grand Panel of the Intellectual Property High Court, Toshiba v. Hynix, that might have resolved the issue, was settled before a ruling was made.

Hal Wegner posted on Saturday a January 2007 article by former Deputy JPO Commissioner Shinjiro Ono, whom Hal attributes as having been "responsible [for] much of the recent push for higher quality examination." The article provides analytic results of Japan's introduction of a specialized patent appeals court, the IP High Court.

Source: Hal Wegner