F-term (patent Law) - Background

Background

The F-term system was developed in 1987 by the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and is maintained by the same body. The F-term system does not have any legal foundation, whereas the IPC system was agreed by the Strasbourg Agreement of 1971.

The F-term system is used by examiners in the JPO who give appropriate F-terms, together with IPC categories, to each patent document published by the JPO.

As with other patent classification systems, F-terms attached to a patent document do not affect the technical scope of the patent right, they simply serve as an index for patent documents.

The IPC system is similar to the scientific classification of organisms; both being hierarchical classification systems based on a single viewpoint. In contrast, the F-term system is like a picture book that presents various views such as "lives in rainforests" or "creatures having wings". The IPC system could be said to be systematic, while the F-term system is intuitive.

The F-term system was developed on the principle that computers will be employed for searching documents using the system. This is evident from the fact that F-terms did not appear on patent documents printed on paper before 2000, only being present in the electronic records up to that date. In particular, the system assumes the availability of set operations such as union or intersection, because all applicable F-terms are applied to each document. (See the fictional example below.) This contrasts with the original basic idea of the IPC that each patent document falls into one subgroup only and documents are stored in book stacks.