Espacenet

Last updated

Espacenet (formerly stylized as esp@cenet) [1] [2] is a free online service for searching patents and patent applications. Espacenet was developed by the European Patent Office (EPO) together with the member states of the European Patent Organisation. Most member states have an Espacenet service in their national language, and access to the EPO's worldwide database, most of which is in English. In 2022, the Espacenet worldwide service claimed to have records on more than 140 million patent publications. [3]

Contents

History

By launching Espacenet in 1998, the EPO is said to have "revolutionized public access to international patent information, releasing patent data from its paper prisons and changing forever how patents are disseminated, organized, searched, and retrieved." [4]

In 2004, i.e. in the early years of Espacenet, Nancy Lambert considered that, although free, Espacenet, like the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database of US patents, "still tend[ed] to have primitive search engines and in some cases rather cumbersome mechanisms to download patents." [5] She reported it as being deliberate, on the part of the USPTO and EPO, "who have said they do not wish to compete unfairly with commercial vendors". [5] In 2009, Espacenet offered the so-called SmartSearch which allows a query to be composed using a subset of Contextual Query Language (CQL). [6]

In 2012, the EPO launched "Patent Translate", a free online automatic translation service for patents. Created in partnership with Google, the translation engine was "specifically built to handle complex and technical patent vocabulary", using "millions of official, human-translated patent documents" to train the translation engine. [7] It covers translations between English and 31 other languages. [8] According to the Patent Information News' magazine published by the EPO, a 2013 independent study compared Espacenet with DepatisNet, Freepatentsonline, Google Patent and the public search facility at the USPTO. In that study, Espacenet reportedly obtained the highest score for both data coverage and customer support, and the best overall aggregated score. [9]

In March 2016, Espacenet began offering full-text search through its collection of English, French and German patent documents. [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States Patent and Trademark Office</span> United States national patent bureau

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexandria, Virginia, after a 2005 move from the Crystal City area of neighboring Arlington, Virginia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European Patent Office</span> One of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation

The European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg), the other being the Administrative Council. The EPO acts as executive body for the organisation while the Administrative Council acts as its supervisory body as well as, to a limited extent, its legislative body. The actual legislative power to revise the European Patent Convention lies with the Contracting States themselves when meeting at a Conference of the Contracting States.

Prior art is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria for patentability. In most systems of patent law, prior art is generally defined as anything that is made available, or disclosed, to the public that might be relevant to a patent's claim before the effective filing date of a patent application for an invention. However, notable differences exist in how prior art is specifically defined under different national, regional, and international patent systems.

A patent examiner is an employee, usually a civil servant with a scientific or engineering background, working at a patent office.

The Trilateral Patent Offices, or simply the Trilateral Offices, are the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In 1983, these patent offices set up a programme of co-operation in an effort to "improve efficiency of the global patent system".

In most patent laws, unity of invention is a formal administrative requirement that must be met for a patent application to proceed to grant. An issued patent can claim only one invention or a group of closely related inventions. The purpose of this requirement is administrative as well as financial. The requirement serves to preclude the possibility of filing one patent application for several inventions, while paying only one set of fees. Unity of invention also makes the classification of patent documents easier.

A patent family is a set of patents or patent applications in various countries in relation to a single invention, for example when a first application in a country – the priority application – is extended to other countries. In other words, a patent family is "the same invention disclosed by a common inventor(s) and patented in more than one country." Patent families can be regarded as a "fortuitous by-product of the concept of priorities for patent applications".

INPADOC, which stands for International Patent Documentation, is a freely available international patent database. It is produced and maintained by the European Patent Office (EPO). INPADOC developed a patent families classification, which groups together patent applications originating from the same priority document(s). It also provides data about the legal status for patent documents in many countries and for large time periods. Although INPADOC is not comprehensive, it keeps expanding the breadth and the depth of its coverage.

The International Patent Classification (IPC) is a hierarchical patent classification system used in over 100 countries to classify the content of patents in a uniform manner. It was created under the Strasbourg Agreement (1971), one of a number of treaties administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The classification is updated on a regular basis by a Committee of Experts, consisting of representatives of the Contracting States of that Agreement with observers from other organisations, such as the European Patent Office.

Isearch is open-source text retrieval software first developed in 1994 by Nassib Nassar as part of the Isite Z39.50 information framework. The project started at the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) of the North Carolina supercomputing center MCNC and funded by the National Science Foundation to follow in the track of WAIS and develop prototype systems for distributed information networks encompassing Internet applications, library catalogs and other information resources.

A patent classification is a system for examiners of patent offices or other people to categorize (code) documents, such as published patent applications, according to the technical features of their content. Patent classifications make it feasible to search quickly for documents about earlier disclosures similar to or related to the invention for which a patent is applied for, and to track technological trends in patent applications.

The European Patent Register, also known as the Register of European Patents, is a public register kept by the European Patent Office (EPO). It contains legal information relating to published European patent applications and European patents granted under the European Patent Convention (EPC). The register notably provides the current legal status of European patent applications and patents, such as for instance "whether a patent application has been published, whether a patent has been granted, what the outcome of opposition proceedings was or whether a patent has been revoked".

The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is an Indian digital knowledge repository of the traditional knowledge, especially about medicinal plants and formulations used in Indian systems of medicine.

This is a list of legal terms relating to patents and patent law. A patent is not a right to practice or use the invention claimed therein, but a territorial right to exclude others from commercially exploiting the invention, granted to an inventor or their successor in rights in exchange to a public disclosure of the invention.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Patents</span> Search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications

Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications.

Patent Information News was a trilingual, quarterly magazine published by the Principal Directorate Patent Information of the European Patent Office (EPO), Vienna sub-office, Austria.

The Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) is a global not-for-profit organization for individuals having a professional, scientific or technical interest in patent information. Its goal is to support, assist, improve and enhance the success of patent information professionals through leadership, education, communication, advocacy and networking. PIUG works to achieve its goals with training programs, conferences, and formal and informal discussion aimed at improving the retrieval, analysis, and dissemination of patent information.

The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) is a patent classification system, which has been jointly developed by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The CPC is substantially based on the previous European classification system (ECLA), which itself was a more specific and detailed version of the International Patent Classification (IPC) system.

The Global Dossier is an online public service launched in June 2014 by the five "IP5" offices, i.e. the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japan Patent Office (JPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), China's National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), to offer an integrated access to the respective "file wrappers", free of charge and with automatic machine translations to English. A file wrapper, also called "public file", contains documents, including the search reports, office actions and correspondence between the applicant and the patent office, relating to a particular patent application. The file wrapper therefore provides the file history of a patent application.

PATENTSCOPE is a global patent database and search system developed and maintained by the World Intellectual Property Organization. It provides free and open access to a vast collection of international patent documents, including patent applications, granted patents, and related technical information.

References

  1. ↑ esp@cenet is a trademark of the European Patent Organisation (see community trade marks No: 001123876, 000881896, 000881813 at EUIPO).
  2. ↑ The "@" in esp@cenet – an old friend retires Archived 2 February 2020 at the Wayback Machine , Patent Information News issue 1/2011, March 2011, p. 5.
  3. ↑ "Espacenet patent search". EPO web site. European Patent Office (EPO). Retrieved 22 October 2022. Espacenet is accessible to beginners and experts and is updated daily. It contains data on more than 140 million patent documents from around the world.
  4. ↑ Michael J. White, "Espacenet Europe's Network of Patent Databases", Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship ( ISSN   1092-1206), Number 47, Summer 2006.
  5. 1 2 Lambert, N. (2004). Internet patent information in the 21st century: A comparison of Delphion, Micropatent, and QPAT Archived 8 July 2007 at the Wayback Machine , 2004 International Chemical Information Conference & Exhibition, Annecy, France, 17–20 October 2004, pp 1–2.
  6. ↑ "Patentinfo News issue 4 2010" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 February 2020. Retrieved 14 March 2013.
  7. ↑ "Highlights of 2012, Launch of Patent Translate". European Patent Office. 4 March 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
  8. ↑ "Patent Translate". European Patent Office. 20 December 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
  9. ↑ "Espacenet comes out top in study" (PDF). Patent Information News. European Patent Office (2, June 2013): 2. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 July 2021. Retrieved 23 June 2013.
  10. ↑ "Full-text searching in Espacenet" (PDF). Patent Information News. European Patent Office (1/2016): 6. 2016. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 May 2019. Retrieved 19 March 2016.
  11. ↑ "Global dossier available in Espacenet". EPO. 24 October 2014. Archived from the original on 14 June 2015. Retrieved 13 June 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.