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Type of site | Digital library for patents |
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| Created by | |
| URL | patents |
| Registration | Not required |
| Launched | December 14, 2006 |
Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications.
| | |
Type of site | Digital library for patents |
|---|---|
| Created by | |
| URL | patents |
| Registration | Not required |
| Launched | December 14, 2006 |
Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications.
Google Patents indexes more than 87 million patents and patent applications with full text from 17 patent offices, including:
These documents include the entire collection of granted patents and published patent applications from each database (which belong to the public domain). US patent documents date back to 1790, EPO and WIPO to 1978. [2] Optical character recognition (OCR) has been performed on the older US patents to make them searchable, and Google Translate has been used on all non-English patents to make the English translations searchable.
Google Patents also indexes documents from Google Scholar and Google Books, and has machine-classified them with Cooperative Patent Classification codes for searching. [3]
Patent litigation information is also available in Google Patents through a partnership with Darts-ip, a global patent litigation database. [4] [5]
The service was launched on December 14, 2006. Google says it uses "the same technology as that underlying Google Books", [6] allowing scrolling through pages, and zooming in on areas. [7] The images are saveable as PNG files.
Google Patents was updated in 2012 with coverage of the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Prior Art Finder tool. [8]
In 2013, it was expanded to cover World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), German Patent Office (German : Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt, DPMA), Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), and China's National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA). All foreign patents were also translated to English and made searchable. [9]
In 2015, a new version was introduced at patents.google.com with a new UI, integration of Google Scholar with machine-classified with Cooperative Patent Classifications (CPCs), and search result clustering into CPCs. [10]
In 2016, coverage of 11 additional patent offices was announced. [11] Support for the USPTO and EPO boolean search syntax (proximity, wildcards, title/abstract/claims fields) was introduced, as well as visual graphs of inventors, assignees and CPCs by date, a thumbnail grid view of search results and downloadable result sets as CSV. [12] [13]
In 2018, global litigation information has been added. Google Patents pages display if a patent (or any member of its family) has a litigation history anywhere in the world and provides a link to the Darts-ip patent cases database. [4] [5]
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 attorney is an attorney who has the specialized qualifications necessary for representing clients in obtaining patents and acting in all matters and procedures relating to patent law and practice, such as filing patent applications and oppositions to granted patents.
A patent examiner is an employee, usually a civil servant with a scientific or engineering background, working at a patent office. Major employers of patent examiners are the European Patent Office (EPO), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the Japan Patent Office (JPO), and other patent offices around the world.
A patent office is a governmental or intergovernmental organization which controls the issue of patents. In other words, "patent offices are government bodies that may grant a patent or reject the patent application based on whether the application fulfils the requirements for patentability."
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.
In German and Austrian patent laws, the Gebrauchsmuster (GebrM), also known as German utility model or Austrian utility model, is a patent-like, intellectual property right protecting inventions.
Under German law, the registered design, formerly called Geschmacksmuster, is a form of intellectual property that extends industrial design rights over the visual design of objects that is not purely utilitarian. The term of a Geschmacksmuster is twenty-five years, as it is for a community design.
epoline is a set of web-based computer programs and services enabling applicants, patentees and their representatives to file patent applications online before the European Patent Office (EPO), as well as to monitor the status of patent applications during their prosecution and patents during an opposition. The epoline products and services have been implemented and are maintained by the EPO, according to the Decision of the President of the EPO dated 29 October 2002.
A patent application is a request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for an invention described in the patent specification and a set of one or more claims stated in a formal document, including necessary official forms and related correspondence. It is the combination of the document and its processing within the administrative and legal framework of the patent office.
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 his successor in rights in exchange to a public disclosure of the invention.
The Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) is a set of initiatives for providing accelerated patent prosecution procedures by sharing information between some patent offices. It also permits each participating patent office to benefit from the work previously done by the other patent office, with the goal of reducing examination workload and improving patent quality.
World Intellectual Property Indicators (WIPI) is an annual statistical report published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The publication provides an overview of the activity in the areas of patents, utility models, trademarks, industrial designs, microorganisms, plant variety protection, geographical indications and the creative economy.
Patent law in modern mainland China began with the promulgation of the Patent Law of the People's Republic of China, in 1984. This law was modeled after patent systems of other civil law countries, particularly Germany and Japan.
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.
IP5 is a forum of the five largest intellectual property offices in the world. The five patent offices are the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japan Patent Office (JPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), and the National Intellectual Property Administration in China.
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.
