EPO - Discussion forums

Hi everyone,

last week I noticed that the Patstat database contains SPCs classified as patents, these documents can be identified by their kind ("I1" and "I2") and are from applications made in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Luxembourg.

Does anyone know why only these countries have SPCs in the Patstat database (since SPCs are EU-wide), and why have they been (wrongly) classified as patents in the database?

Best regards,
Dave

The EPO does not receive many SPC publications from other offices, consequently you will find publications in PATSTAT only for some countries. Much more complete SPC data can be found in PATSTAT Legal Status (table TLS221_INPADOC_PRS), so I encourage you to have a look there.

As an outlook to the 2017 Spring edition: PATSTAT's legal status table will be completely restructured. Then the legal event data (e.g. SPCs) will be modelled more explicitly and will be easier to work with.

And you are right: SPCs are based on patents, but - strictly speaking - they are not patents. However, I suppose for historic reasons the EPO did not introduce a new kind of IP right, but data wise treated them like patents. Nevertheless, SPCs can be clearly identified by the publication kind codes or legal events.

Best regards,
Martin
PATSTAT/ EPO