All patents that one company holds in a specific year

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student_kn
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Aug 02, 2017 5:48 pm

All patents that one company holds in a specific year

Post by student_kn » Wed Aug 02, 2017 6:17 pm

Hello everybody,

I need to do a research paper for my studies.
For my research I need to know all patents a company holds in a specific year.
Because in a subsequent analysis, I want to check how many patents the company lost from one year to another. For example, I need to know every patent that "Fresenius" holds in the year 2001. After that I need to know every patent that "Fresenius" holds in 2002.

Can you please help me with a correct query?
Is it possible to adapt the following code:

Code: Select all

SELECT DISTINCT *
FROM tls201_appln a
JOIN tls207_pers_appln pa on a.appln_id = pa.appln_id
JOIN tls206_person p on pa.person_id = p.person_id
WHERE appln_auth = 'EP'
AND a.appln_id < 900000000   
AND appln_filing_year = 1998
AND applt_seq_nr > 0  
AND psn_name like 'Fresenius%'
AND psn_sector like 'company'
ORDER BY psn_name
Beside of that, I have got another question:
Is it possible with PATSTAT to find out, how many patents a company sold in one year and how many patents expired within the same year?

Many thanks in advance.

Kind regards
Simon


Geert Boedt
Posts: 176
Joined: Tue Oct 19, 2004 10:36 am
Location: Vienna

Re: All patents that one company holds in a specific year

Post by Geert Boedt » Thu Aug 03, 2017 11:24 am

Hello Simon,
the main challenge with your request is the definition of "a company that holds patents ".
The bibliographical data in PATSTAT (and most other patent data bases) is referring to the "applicants", at the moment the respective patent document is published.
"Holding patents" is linked to ownership, and registration of ownership of patents is hardly regulated. With other words, for most countries (and also EPO) there is no legal obligation for applicants of patent owners to register a change of ownership.
Some changes can be identified through legal status data (INPADOC), or through the fact that a new "applicant" appears on a later publication instance.
Keeping the above in mind, you could identify patents where the applicant is different from person names appearing on later applications. (via tls227). You could also use PATSTAT register and look in the "parties" table if there are differences between "is latest" and others. (this data is not harmonised, so it will be difficult to do this for large sets as it requires probably some cleaning.)
Also have a look at : https://forums.epo.org/question-on-pate ... ship-4771
On the "selling" of patents: there is not much data available (and what is available is often "voluntary" supplied by the new owners). There is also a data quality issue, namely many "corrections of addresses" have been recorded as a change of ownership. Additionally, some "changes of ownership" might simply be due to transferring IP within the same company - but in another country-.

On validity of a patents, kindly look at this topic:
https://forums.epo.org/epo-patent-nat-p ... 9#p17419
Bottom line: doing statistics across multiple application authorities will not be straightforward. You probably will need to take representative samples and do some manual work on researching the status of the applications.
Best regards,

Geert Boedt
PATSTAT support
Business Use of Patent Information
EPO Vienna


student_kn
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Aug 02, 2017 5:48 pm

Re: All patents that one company holds in a specific year

Post by student_kn » Thu Aug 03, 2017 4:12 pm

Thank you very much for your detailed reply.

In the topic you mentioned ("EPO Patent: Nat. patent validation recorded as application?") I read that it is possible to research the status of an application.
So, I would need a list with the patents applied of a specific company in a specific year (e.g. the patents "Fresenius" applied in the year 1997).
Afterwards I will do some manual work and researching the status of some of those applications.

Can you please help me with the query code for the status of an applications?

I tried this one (I changed a bit the code of the other topic):

Code: Select all

Select appln_auth+appln_nr+' '+appln_kind ap_number, appln_filing_date, prs_code, l501ep, l518ep,l520ep
    from tls201_appln 
    join tls231_inpadoc_legal_event 
    on tls201_appln.appln_id = tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.appln_id
	where tls201_appln.appln_auth = 'EP' 
    and appln_nr = '06807506' 
    and prs_code = 'pgfp'
	order by prs_event_seq_nr tls231_inpadoc_legal_event
I think the INPADOC table changed and the code needs some adjustment.
I think I need "fee_country", "fee_payment_date", "fee_renewal_date", ....


Many thanks in advance.

Simon


Geert Boedt
Posts: 176
Joined: Tue Oct 19, 2004 10:36 am
Location: Vienna

Re: All patents that one company holds in a specific year

Post by Geert Boedt » Fri Sep 01, 2017 7:43 am

Hello Simon,
the model of the PATSTAT Legal data base has indeed changed a little bit; some of the attributes have been renamed.

This is an adapted query based on the one you used:

Code: Select all

SELECT appln_auth+appln_nr+' '+appln_kind ap_number, appln_filing_date, event_seq_nr, event_code, event_publn_date, fee_country, fee_payment_date, fee_renewal_year, fee_text
    from tls201_appln 
    join tls231_inpadoc_legal_event 
    on tls201_appln.appln_id = tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.appln_id
	where tls201_appln.appln_auth = 'EP' 
    and appln_nr = '06807506' 
    and event_code = 'pgfp'
	order by event_seq_nr
For up-to-date information on the tables and the attirbutes, please check the relevant Data Catalog that goes with the PATSTAT version that you are using.
http://www.epo.org/searching-for-patent ... html#tab-3

Adapting the query a bit further to narrow down to certain applicant you have to include the tls206_person table. Something like this:

Code: Select all

SELECT appln_auth+appln_nr+' '+appln_kind ap_number, psn_name, person_ctry_code,appln_filing_date, event_seq_nr, event_code, event_publn_date, fee_country, fee_payment_date, fee_renewal_year, fee_text
    from tls201_appln 
    join tls231_inpadoc_legal_event on tls201_appln.appln_id = tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.appln_id
    join tls207_pers_appln on tls201_appln.appln_id = tls207_pers_appln.appln_id
    join tls206_person on tls207_pers_appln.person_id = tls206_person.person_id
   	where applt_seq_nr > 0 and psn_name = 'Fresenius'
    and event_code = 'pgfp'
	order by tls201_appln.appln_id, event_seq_nr
You have to keep in mind that patent validity years follow the application date and not the calendar year.
You could use for example criteria as "where renewal fee was paid for in the year 2000" and the "fee-renewal-year <= 20", then you know that the fee was also paid for the previous year. If a fee was then paid in 1999, and fee_renewal_year <=20, then you know that the applicant did not want to keep the patent further alive. Be careful when you do this for the most recent years, some countries apply generous grace times to pay renewal fees and also the PATSTAT production process could distort the data for the most recent year(s).
Best regards,

Geert Boedt
PATSTAT support
Business Use of Patent Information
EPO Vienna


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