Welcome by the President
The first independent Hungarian patent act was adopted by the Parliament 120 years ago, in 1895. The Act XXXVII of 1895 entered into force on 1 March 1896 – so this year and next year there will be two occasions to look back, to pay tribute to the results of the past, to lay the foundations for the future. This year we celebrate the putting down of the solid legal grounds, next year the 120th anniversary of the establishment of the office charged with the implementation of the Act.
What could be more adequate to celebrate these anniversaries spanning several generations than improving and enlarging the services of the office.
The Hungarian Patent Office launched its website nearly two decades ago, on the occasion of the centenary; this service was a novelty in the Hungarian governmental sector at the time. The content of the website operating continuously since 1996 has been enlarged with new elements – evidently – week after week, day by day: official notifications, important news related to the office, developments concerning intellectual property.
Significant changes have been performed several times, the most important ones are as follows: in 2004 the structure of the website was completely renewed, its content was notably enlarged. Since that year not only our official gazette, namely the Gazette of Patents and Trademarks but the electronic version of the registers containing industrial property applications filed at the office have also been accessible on our website. On the date when the name of the office was changed, 1 January 2011, the domain name was modified as well. Also in 2011, our services offered were extended, among others, with electronic filing and an e-search database allowing search in the whole industrial property portfolio.
Our efforts to regularly renew and develop the website have been justified by the statistics on users. More than half a million individually identified visitors downloaded 11 million pages from the office’s website in 2014. The website accessible under the domain name szellemitulajdon.hu providing information for the public had more than a hundred thousand readers last year.
Taking the fact – which is absolutely supported by the analysis of the data of this latter website – that the use of mobile devices is increasing, the management of the office decided, in honour of the anniversary of the patent act, to make the website of the office accessible by applying a revolutionary new technology. From now on, visitors can enjoy the advantages of responsive technology, a solution that can be used not only on PCs but also on tablets and smart phones.
It would be difficult to rank - therefore I do not put them in order- which means a greater change in the new website: the possibility of accession by mobile devices or the fundamentally changed content of the opening page.
Hoping that this significant development will appeal to the public and the professional users, I wish every visitor useful and successful browse through the renewed website of the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office.
Budapest, 28 April 2015.
Dr. Miklós Bendzsel
President