earliest_filing_date for inventors

[marcastell]

Hello,

I have a question regarding the variable earliest_filing_date for inventors in PATSTAT online.

I noticed that very often all inventors within a family have an appln_filing_date that is exactly 1 year later than the earliest_filing_date. Two things look weird to me: 1, no one has the appln_date corresponding to the earliest one; 2, inventors have their date exactly 1 year later (e.g. 2001-02-28 vs 2000-02-28) How do you explain this?

Thanks!

[EPO / PATSTAT Support]

Hello Marcastell,
the earliest_filing_date is "The earliest date of the filing dates of the application itself, its international application, its Paris Convention priority applications, the applications with which it is related via technical relations and its application continuations."
When an applicant files a patent that claims priority from an earlier priority, this should be done within the time span of 1 year. (Paris convention). Therefore many times the difference between the earliest filing date and the earliest filing date will often be very close to exactly 1 year. (US continuations are an exception on this general rule.)

See the PATSTAT data catalog for detailed information.
This data has no relation at all to the applicant or inventor information.

Applications that are so called "first filings" will normally have an application date = earliest_filing_date.
You can very easily identify such applications via the query below:

Code: Select all

SELECT TOP (1000) [appln_id]
      ,[appln_auth]
      ,[appln_nr]
      ,[appln_kind]
      ,[appln_filing_date]
      ,[appln_filing_year]
      ,[appln_nr_epodoc]
      ,[appln_nr_original]
      ,[ipr_type]
      ,[receiving_office]
      ,[internat_appln_id]
      ,[earliest_filing_date]
      ,[granted]
FROM [tls201_appln]
where appln_filing_date = earliest_filing_date