Patent protection for an invention is valid for 20 years from the application’s filing date. There are however some cases where you can apply for an extended period of five years of protection. Especially for patents pertaining to medicinal products and plant protection products, the term of protection can be extended by up to five years. This extension is called a Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC).

When a patents validity has expired, the SPC protection may begin. The SPC covers the active compound/compounds that are protected by the patent.

SPC is common when it comes to patents in the pharmaceutical sector and extends the duration of the patent in order to compensate the patent owner for the time between patent filing and and when the product is authorized for sale, which usually is a long time and a complex procedure.

For more information click here.

The post SPC- Supplementary Protection Certificate appeared first on IamIP.

The majority of countries priority numbers are made up of a country code (two letters), the year of filing (four digits), and a serial number (variable, maximum seven digits).

Some countries use other formats. These are Australia, Germany, China, Brazil, Ukraine, Gulf Council, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, OAPI and WIPO.
Their application numbers are made up of:

• a country code (two letters)
• the year of filing (four digits)
• “other” information (one or two characters)
• a serial number (five or six digits)

The post Priority Number appeared first on IamIP.

Patent classifications are used by patent offices to assign patent applications, issued patents and utility models to technical areas and thus make them retrievable. All technical areas are covered. 

The patent classifications are assigned upon filing a patent and during the examining process by the examiners. The first assigned classes are shown in the patent document. Classes can be amended during the examination process if new aspects are added or if the first assignment was incomplete or wrong. These amendments are reported by the patent offices and are available in databases,  such as the DOCDB of the European Patent Office.

The most important patent classifications are the International Patent Classification (IPC) and the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC).

Patent offices worldwide use the IPC. There are approximately 70 000 different IPC codes for different technical areas.

The CPC is an extension of the IPC and includes approximately 250 000 classification entries.

More on IPC, or
More on CPC.

The post Patent Classification appeared first on IamIP.

FI [File Index] and F-term [File forming term] are Japanese patent classification systems, consisting of approx. 190,000 and 360,000 entries, respectively, which enable efficient searches for patent documents.

The FI codes are based on the IPC [International Patent Classification].

Here you can find more information on classifications such as IPC, CPC, US classes and ECLA.

The post FI and F-terms Patent Classification appeared first on IamIP.

Previously the EPO used the ECLA patent classification system and the US used their own classification system.

In order to harmonize the two systems the CPC (Cooperative patent classification) system was created. 

The post ECLA-European Patent Classification appeared first on IamIP.

By having some basic understanding of interpreting kind codes, reviewing of patent documents will speed up. Kind codes are the two letters at the end of a patent number. As a general rule of thumb, documents with an A at the end usually means that that the document you are reviewing is a published patent application. If there is a B at the end, it usually means the patent was granted at some time and is the published patent with the respective allowed claims. 

The WIPO Recommended Standard provides for groups of letter codes in order to distinguish patent documents published by patent offices. The letter codes also facilitate the storage and retrieval of such documents.

The kind code is placed after the publication/patent number. For example, EP2884868A1, where A1 is the kind code meaning that this is a European patent application published with European search report, see below example.

The following is a list of European and international patent document kind codes:

The post Kind Codes appeared first on IamIP.

The application number for the majority of countries is made up of a country code (two letters), the year of filing (four digits), and a serial number (variable, maximum seven digits). A serial number having fewer than seven digits may be rounded up to seven digits by adding zeros (eg GB19950008026).

Alternatively, the zeros may be omitted entirely (eg GB19958026).

There are twelve countries/organisations which use another format, namely Australia, Germany, China, Brazil, Ukraine, Gulf Council, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, OAPI and the WIPO.

In this case, the application number is made up of :

• a country code (two letters)
• the year of filing (four digits)
• “other” information (one or two characters)
• a numerical digit (five to six)

There is a fixed length of 13 characters, excluding the kind code and where appropriate the fixed length is achieved by inserting leading zeroes.

The post Application Number appeared first on IamIP.

Most patent offices provide access to these file wrappers. Here you can find all the correspondence between the owner of the patent and the patent office including all documentation, amendments and arguments and get the complete picture of a case.  

Many of the major agencies (EPO, WIPO, USPTO, GTPO) provide online access to patent filing process data through the Patent Registry. In many cases, access to the patent files is also possible. 
Links to the registers: 
EPO (European Patent Office) 
GPTO (German Patent and Trademark Office) 
USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) 
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) 

The post Patent Register appeared first on IamIP.

Within 12 months of that first filing, a subsequent patent application for the same invention can be filed claiming this “priority right”. 

According to the Paris Convention anyone who files a patent application, can within 12 months (the priority year), apply in another country and claim priority from the first application.  

When it comes to novelty, priority means that your later application can be seen as if it was filed the same time as your first application. The priority date is the filing of your first application.   

The post Priority Date appeared first on IamIP.

When filing the patent, the applicant often refers to already published patent documents on the state of the art. During the examination process with patent offices, additional published patent documents can be found. These published patent documents are referred as cited patent documents. 

Also, one’s own patent is used within the life cycle of other companies patent filings, e.g. competitors. These are called citing patent documents. 

The number of citing patent documents can be an indicator of the importance of the patent. A frequently cited patent can be an indication of a core technology. 
Citation search is also a powerful tool for research. 

Citations are listed once you are looking at the detailed information.

If you would like to see all cited or citing documents from any publication you simply click the green button and they will appear in a new window. When you click “All cited” or “All citing” you will get all citations from the patent family, not just the publication you are viewing.  
  
Sometimes there are no citations documents visible, then you need to switch publication, click on any of the publications under “Also published as” to do this. 

You can mouse over a patent number to see additional information, or you can click on a specific number to view it. 

The post Citations- Cited or Citing appeared first on IamIP.