EPO - Discussion forums

I'm doing research on patent delay problems in countries like India and Brazil and want to know what PATSTAT subscription is the best for this type of study. The different options are confusing and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

-Kevin

Hello Kevin,

I fear that the data coverage of Indian patents in PATSTAT is not sufficient to carry out "delay analysis" for India.
This query shows that we do not have information on granted patents for India. appln_auth granted not_granted total
BR - 2932 - 570561 - 599886
IN - 0 - 85686 - 85686

For Brazil we have some information on granted patents, but looking at the figures, I assume there are more granted patents then what we have indicated as "granted" in PATSTAT. Any study involving "patent granting procedures" would mean you need to have PATSTAT in combination with the EPO Worldwide Legal Status Database for PATSTAT. This database does not have any coverage for IN national applications. There is coverage for BR, but -again- you need to check if it contains the information and coverage useful for your study.
PATSTAT: http://www.epo.org/searching-for-patent ... tstat.html
Coverage:
http://www.epo.org/searching-for-patent ... eekly.html
If you would want to carry such study on applications filed at the EPO, then I would recommend to purchase the "European Patent Register for PATSTAT " database. This data base contains all (public) procedural and event data for European patents.

Mr. Boedt,

Thank you very much for your reply. I was hoping you could recommend a training webinar that would describe how to run searches in PATSTAT similar to the one you ran as an example in your reply.

-Kevin

Hello Kevin,
there is a classroom training planned now in March (2016).
You can find it through this link; just search for "PATSTAT".
http://www.epo.org/learning-events/events/search.html
(At this moment: http://www.epo.org/learning-events/even ... l?id=13258)
We also had a webinar last week which will be published shortly. The webinar is more of an overview then a training module, but it is a good start.

Then there is also the self-learning module and he documentation you can find on our website.
Have a look at the "downloads" tab at this link:

http://www.epo.org/searching-for-patent ... tstat.html

Dear Mr. Boedt,

Can you advise how I would query on the basis of the date the patent was granted (versus filed or published)?

Thank you for your assistance,

-Kevin

Hello Kevin,
filed but un-published patents are not available to the public. Patent applications are (normally) published 18 months after the filing date, after which they become available to the public. Once the patent is granted, the "patent specification" containing the granted claims will be published. Generalised for EP patents: the A1 document is the publication (containing all the claims and the search report), the B1 document (containing only the claims that were granted) indicates that the patent is (was) granted.
The "date" of the EP B1 publication gives you the date when the patent was granted. Absence of the B1 publication can indicated that the patent is not (yet) granted. The time frame between filing and granting of the patent depends on the complexity of the invention.

However, different patent authorities (and grant procedures) use different publication codes to identify the granted patents. Therefore, to make it easier for PATSTAT users, we have pre-aggregated an attribute "grant" in the tls201_appln table that has the value "1" when the patent was granted or "0" when no publication is available that the patent was granted. You need to check the data coverage to see whether or not PATSTAT contains the information from the countries you want to include in your research.
Smalle example: assume you want to retrieve all patents filed in Sweden in 2005 that were granted.
This is the query:

Mr. Boedt,

I wanted to ask you about searching for granted patents using the tsl211 table. A colleague of mine said there may be a way to arrive at grant date in an indirect manner using the publn_first_grant query. I have tried running some queries, specifically for Argentine patents, using this qualifier, but have not had much luck. Are you aware of this method for arriving at patent grant data? I appreciate your help.

Thanks,

Kevin Madigan

Your colleague is right. For example see some publications with granting effect (publn_first_grant = 1) from Switzerland:
The publication date of publications with granting effect corresponds in almost all cases to the date of grant. In some jurisdictions there are exceptions. E.g. to my knowledge, utility models in Austria are published 2 month after the date of grant.

You checked with patents from Argentina. Unfortunately the EPO does not have any publications with granting effect from Argentina since 1995, so you won't find them in PATSTAT.

Hello Kevin,
you also need to look at legal status data in the tls221_inpadoc_prs data to get a comprehensive overview of "granted" patents. PATSTAT is based on publications, for which the EPO has received the bibliographical data. INPADOC contains legal status information, provided to the EPO by the respective national patent offices.
Specific for Argentina, we do not have patent publications that indicate that a patent was granted (in fact, maybe there are no publications, you would need to check with the Argentinian patent offices to see whether the granting procedure involves a specific publication that proves the grant), but, we receive legal status information that a patent was granted. Remember that the attribute "granted" only takes into account the fact that EPO has received bibliographical data of a publication indicating a grant. It does NOT take into account inpadoc legal status data.

Have a look at this query:
order by appln_filing_date desc