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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]
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.
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."
Patent prosecution is the interaction between applicants and a patent office with regard to a patent application or a patent.
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.
The Japan Patent Office is a Japanese governmental agency in charge of industrial property right affairs, under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The Japan Patent Office is located in Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda, Tokyo and is one of the world's largest patent offices. The Japan Patent Office's mission is to promote the growth of the Japanese economy and industry by administering the laws relating to patents, utility models, designs, and trademarks. Copyright affairs are administered by the Agency for Cultural Affairs.
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, and to track technological trends in patent applications.
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 their successor in rights in exchange to a public disclosure of the invention.
The involvement of the public in patent examination is used in some forms to help identifying relevant prior art and, more generally, to help assessing whether patent applications and inventions meet the requirements of patent law, such as novelty, inventive step or non-obviousness, and sufficiency of disclosure.
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.
In patent law, a kind code, or WIPO Standard ST.16 code, is a code used on patent documents published by intellectual property offices to distinguish different kinds of patent documents. A kind code includes a letter, and in many cases a number, used to distinguish the kind of patent document and the level of publication. The recommended use is the two-letter country code followed by the patent document number and then the kind code, e.g., "US 7,654,321 B1" for U.S. Patent No. 7,654,321 where there was no previously-published patent application publication, and "US 2003/1234567 A1" for U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/1234567, published in 2003.
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.
