Tour of Patent Offices: this time it's Lithuania

The SPC Blog's tour of European patent offices takes us next to Lithuania. The website of the State Patent Bureau of the Republic of Lithuania is accessible in the local language and in English. The site is more transparent than many, having a site-counter that tells readers how many visitors the site has received in total, how many have visited that day and how many are online at that precise moment. I was a little surprised to learn that, mid-day on Sunday, I was already the 6,283rd visitor to the site that day -- but perhaps Sunday is a popular day for IP activity in the Baltic region.

The formal structure of the site divides subject-matter between inventions, topographies, trade marks and designs. There is no page or click-through that is devoted to supplementary patent certificates at all. However, a site search for "SPC" throws up one hit -- a 300 page pdf document dated 27 February 2006 which turns out to be the Official Gazette. A word search of that document produces two hits for "SPC" and none at all for "supplementary patent certificate". Site searches for "supplementary protection certificate" fare substantially, producing four hits of which three are in English: two are from the 2oo2 Annual Report, the third being a read-only Word document containing the English translation of the Lithuanian Patent Act as amended to June 2005.