Michelle Lee speaks to AIPLA on Oct. 23 about unified patent classification system

The Bloomberg post Patent Offices Seek to Plug Global System's Black Holes contains several patent news items, including the goal of unifying patent classification systems among the world's patent offices. Michelle Lee, now nominated as the permanent director of the USPTO, was quoted:


“That should make patent examination both faster and better, supporting our focus on patent quality,” Michelle Lee, the deputy director of the U.S. patent office, said in prepared remarks delivered today [Oct. 23] to the American Intellectual Property Law Association [AIPLA] conference in Washington



The post also mentioned Google translate:


A program developed by Google Inc. (GOOG) helps translate documents from 32 languages to determine if an idea is actually new, eliminating what could be “black holes in the system,” Battistelli said. As many as 20,000 translation requests are being made each day, mostly between English and Chinese or English and German, he said.