SA = spherical aberration
COF = curvature of field
As for US re-issue of Japanese patents:
That the US20130135514A1 patent application “claims the benefit of Japanese Patent Application No. 2011-261634, filed Nov. 30, 2011 and is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety “, ensures that any additional claims made in the US application, because it was filed on Nov. 15, 2012 and hence within the 12 month priority year, is allowed to use the first priority date of the Japanese patent. Since being granted patents, is very much about who was “first to file”, this backdating and possible expansion of claims can be quite important.
Further Japanese "kokai" patent applications are not made "made public" until 18 month after their filing - in Japanese and without a search database. I do not know how “made public” is to be interpreted in regards to publication in other languages, but that US20130135514A1 was published on May 30. 2013, or exactly 18 month to the original filing date, is likely no coincidence either.
But let’s take another example to underline the principle. The super zoom Patent application mentioned on CR May28. 2013: The Japanese app is JP2013-97184 with a filing/priority date of Nov 1. 2011. The US app is filed Oct 1.2012 i.e. within the 12 month priority year. The US app is published 18 month after the original filing data, namely May 2. 2013 – whereas the JP app is not published until May 20. 2013.
Hence how much “news value” an US patent application with a JP priority has, cannot be assessed from the cited sentence alone, and unless you have a JPO subscription on the weekly patent database CD update and fluent in “Patent Japanese”, I guess it will be hard getting the news much “fresher” than the corresponding US applications (for those JP apps that are actually filed in the US or the EU, that is)..
~ hans ~
