European Patent Office (EPO)
The European Patent Register is a complete and up-to-date source of publicly available bibliographic and procedural information on European and PCT patent applications designating the EPO from the moment they are published and as they pass through each stage of the granting process.
This free online web application allows users to find all the publicly accessible documents from the files maintained by the European Patent Office on these patent applications.
The Register also includes direct links to the patent registers of many of the EPO member states, showing the status of European patents after grant, when the different national patent offices take over responsibility for them.
The Federated European Patent Register, as part of the Register, displays bibliographic and legal status data relating to European patents in the post-grant phase. This information is made available by the national offices of the states concerned.
The Register, via the Global Dossier, provides access to the public documents (or “file wrapper”) for members of a patent family from the offices concerned for Canadian, Chinese, European, Japanese, Korean, US and PCT applications. It also offers machine translations of Chinese, Japanese and Korean documents into English.
The integrated Register Alert service allows users to monitor changes to data in the European Patent Register. Users can monitor up to 5 000 files of their choice and opt to receive an e-mail alert every time a change triggering a Register event occurs to one of their selected files.
Users can use the European Patent Register to:
• find out what stage in the procedure a European patent application has reached
• see whether a European patent application has been granted
• check whether any oppositions to a European patent have been filed
• retrieve patent family data relating to European patent applications
• read correspondence between the EPO and patent applicants/attorneys
• access patent application dossiers from the world’s largest patent offices
• retrieve bibliographic and legal status information relating to European patents in the post-grant phase
• monitor event changes in selected applications via the Register Alert service
The “Smart search” field displayed on the European Patent Register landing page allows users to enter inventor or applicant names, numbers, dates, keywords and classes in any order, without having to specify what exactly they want to search. Based on the search terms, the system will interpret the search fields intended by the users.
Smart search also accepts command line searches using field identifiers and functions in Contextual Query Language (CQL). Field identifiers (there are 18 in all) are entered before the search terms and indicate the fields in which the search terms are to be searched.
Users can access an advanced search area by clicking on the “Advanced search” toggle in the main toolbar. Here users can easily enter search terms in the different search fields connected by the operator “AND”.
Truncation symbols, i.e. wildcards, can also be used in both smart and advanced search to expand the search to include, for example, the plural forms of a word.
The European Patent Register allows users to retrieve patent documents based on International Patent Classification (IPC).
In the “Patent family” tab of the European Patent Register, the simple (equivalent) and extended family members are displayed.
Search results are displayed in the result list in text format (title, application number, publication number, applicant name, representative name, IPC).
The search terms are highlighted in the result list and panel views.
The result list can be exported (CSV and XLS) and printed.
Titles are available in English, French and German.
Whenever available, the Register provides a panel view with the following information for each result: bibliographic data, legal status data, legal events, citations, patent family information, file inspection and post-grant data.
All the panel views can be printed and downloaded.
There are three different types of alert:
1) RSS feeds to monitor changes in the following views:
• Search results (changes in the search results for a specific search criterion)
• Patent family (collectively EP and CN dossier changes)
• All documents (EP dossier changes)
• Global Dossier (individual EP and CN dossier changes)
2) Email alerts to monitor changes in the following views:
• Patent family (collectively EP and CN dossiers changes)
• Global Dossier (individual EP and CN dossier changes)
• All documents (EP dossier changes)
3) Register Alert email alerts
• to monitor event changes to published EP and Euro-PCT applications
In the Register users can download up to 20 displayed search results in csv or xlsx format with the following information: title, application number, publication number, applicant names, representative names, IPC.
ST36 data download is possible in the panel views “About this file”, “Legal status”, “Federated Register”, “Event history”, “Citations” and “Patent family”.
The file inspection “All documents” panel view, can be downloaded in pdf format.
The Register includes references to non-patent literature (NPL) citations.
Boolean operators, AND, OR and NOT, can be used in the Register to combine terms in the search query.
In the smart search area, users can search using:
- logical operators: “all” to retrieve documents containing all terms in any order when used between a field identifier and terms entered within quotes; “any” to retrieve documents containing any terms in any order when used between a field identifier and terms entered within quotes.
- proximity operators: “prox/distance<nr” to limit the distance between terms in the order shown; “prox/unit=sentence” to retrieve the terms in the same sentence).
- comparison operators: “=”, “>=”, “<=”, “within” to be used with a date-related field identifier to specify periods of time.
More information at Register – Pocket guide (http://documents.epo.org/projects/babylon/eponet.nsf/0/61E49C570C2441DD…).
Users can use three different wildcard characters to search in the European Patent Register’s smart search and advanced search:
- the wildcard * stands for a string of characters of any length
- the wildcard ? stands for zero characters or one character
- the wildcard # stands for exactly one character
At least three alphanumeric characters must precede a * symbol and at least two alphanumeric characters must precede a ? or # symbol.
If two alphanumeric characters precede a ? or # symbol, then a maximum of three truncation symbols is allowed.
If three or more alphanumeric characters precede a ? or # symbol, then a maximum of seven truncation symbols is allowed.
More information at Register – Pocket guide (http://documents.epo.org/projects/babylon/eponet.nsf/0/61E49C570C2441DD…).