Family issue

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Eduardo Mercadante
Posts: 12
Joined: Thu Sep 17, 2020 12:04 pm

Family issue

Post by Eduardo Mercadante » Fri Dec 03, 2021 5:15 pm

Hello,

I was trying to find if an Argentinian (AR) application belonged to a family that had an WO application.

On PATSTAT, the AR application (id = 317447407) belonged to a DOCDB family with only one other application from Uruguay (UY). In the INPADOC family, the AR and UY applications are joined by the same applications they cite as earliest filings: two artificial US applications. My conclusion based on this is that the AR application does not belong to a family that also has a WO application.

However, looking on Espacenet, I found the AR and the UY applications with an indication that both belong to an INPADOC family with 54 members, including one WO application. The AR, UY, and WO applications all cite exactly the same priorities, which should make them also members of the same DOCDB family. Here are the links:
AR application: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publica ... cale=en_EP
UY application: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publica ... KC=A1&ND=6
WO application: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publica ... ale=en_EP#

Looking for the WO application on PATSTAT, I found 51 applications in the DOCDB family and 55 in the INPADOC family.

This makes me have three questions:

1- Why are the AR and UY applications in different DOCDB and INPADOC families than the WO if they claim the same priorities?
2- Why is the number of INPADOC family members different on PATSTAT and INPADOC?
3- If this is an error, what caused it, how often does it happen, and how to detect and correct it?

All the best,
Eduardo Mercadante
PhD student at LSE


EPO / PATSTAT Support
Posts: 425
Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:33 pm
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Re: Family issue

Post by EPO / PATSTAT Support » Tue Dec 07, 2021 4:22 pm

Hello Eduardo,
The DOCDB patent family concept is based on a couple of rules from which the main one says: patents having the same priorities belong to the same family.
But the fact is that, it happens that the priority information is not correct. This is sometimes reflected by looking at the pdf (printed document), but sometimes the data has been wrongly recorded.

In this case: a correction was done by the EPO on the priority of the AR an UY filings, after which they lined up with the PCT (and made them all belong to the same family).
You can see that on the AR -pdf: the priority on the printed document is different then what is in the Espacenet biblio. UY can not be manually checked as there was no PDF document delivered.
This correction (done in September 2021) was NOT yet reflected when the PATSTAT backfile was extracted (August 2021). So PATSTAT is "still" wrong, until next year.

On the frequency this happens : daily. We have about 3 million applications added to our data base every 6 months and users of our data can report data errors when detected; for example via the Espacenet "report data error" form. Errors in the references to priority filings are continuously corrected. We do have some check and balances in place to detect errors at the source, but many of the errors are also reported by the users.
PATSTAT Support Team
EPO - Vienna
patstat @ epo.org


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