On coverage of Design Patents (US)

[eltermann]

Hello,

First of all, thank you for OPS and Espacenet. These are great services and extremely useful.

So, my problem is that I've been searching some specific Design Patents from USPTO without success.

For instance:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Pars ... er=D267676
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Pars ... er=D271895
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Pars ... er=D311138
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Pars ... er=D375756
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Pars ... er=D401820

(please note that these patents are in patft, then corresponding to granted patents)

Unlike other granted design patents, I'm unable to find those using OPS (neither Espacenet). Each of the following requests return "status: not found":

http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... 76S/biblio
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... 95S/biblio
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... 38S/biblio
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... 56S/biblio
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... 20S/biblio

So, I digged into it a little and found something interesting.

According to this report [1] there are more than 500k granted Design Patents (summing column "Design Patent Grants" from 1976 to 2015).

However, according to bibliographic coverage [2], there are ~330k Design Patents (row where IDs contain "USD"). Also according to information on this page, data ranges from 1865 to 2016.

There are, indeed, pretty old and pretty recent Design Patents, as can be seen in the following endpoints:

http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... 67S/biblio
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... 40S/biblio


So, my question is: what is the reason for the (apparently relevant) number of missing USPTO Design Patents? Is there something in common on these cases?

[1] http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido ... s_stat.htm
[2] https://www.epo.org/searching-for-paten ... tions.html

[EPO / OPS Support]

Hi,

If you look at a more detailed coverage table available (weekly updated snapshot of the entire database) on our website you will see that we really only started to load more or less complete US design data (S1) from 2001 on: https://www.epo.org/searching-for-paten ... eekly.html (see Docdb bibliographic coverage table).

Information that you've found in Espacenet coverage is not wrong either, its just not that detailed as the one on bibliographic data in EPO's databases. What Espacenet is showing you is that even before 2001 there will be few design publications loaded in the database but really only very few. Usually they were loaded because EPO's examiners requested them in cases when such applications were cited or being in some other way relevant to the examiners during examination procedure and for that we've requested specific documents from respective patent office and have later added such documents into our databases. There is a lot of such publications in our databases so it is always worth to have a closer look at detailed information and coverage of bibliographic data is the best source because bibliographic data set is a basic requirement for any data to appear in any of our databases or products. If we have full text, PDF and abstract of the document in house, but we don't have basic biblio to attach this information to we will not be able to load such document in our databases.

As far as numbering used in OPS, as soon as you need a kind code added it is almost better to use Docdb format because Epodoc is a problem for kind codes with two digests:
Docdb:
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... .S1/biblio
ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/published ... 8.S/biblio

EPODOC (S1 must be without "1", as in example:)
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... 72S/biblio
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/pu ... 88S/biblio

If you ever have trouble with number formats at the EPO, which can be sometimes quite different from original number formats, you can always check tables available here: https://www.epo.org/searching-for-paten ... gular.html

I hope this helps,

OPS support

[eltermann]

It helped a lot, for sure. I was looking for coverage information with shallow time resolution. Thanks for clarifying it.

Are there any plans to include a broad coverage of US Design Patents (earlier than 2001) in DOCDB? This kind of addition depend on EPO or USPTO?

[EPO / OPS Support]

Glad to help. I didn't hear of any such plans but I will ask again and post the information here as soon I get some.

Regards,
OPS support

[EPO / OPS Support]

I've checked with our colleagues in charge of loading data and they confirmed that we don't have any current plans to load older design data. We could only load what we received from the USPTO.

Regards,
OPS support