Transfer of ownership

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mengfanliu
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2023 11:23 am

Transfer of ownership

Post by mengfanliu » Mon Feb 27, 2023 4:04 pm

I am wondering whether there is a way to capture the cases where a change of ownership takes place. Ideally, I should be able to tell who are the assignee and assignor for each case and eventually to identify the count of patent purchase at the firm-year level.

According to my understanding, these cases should be recorded in tls231 since apparently these are important types of legal events. But I do not find a clear category in the INPADOC manual despite it says in DataCatalog version 5.20 (page 79/350) that for tls231
Typical events are request for examination, payment of renewal fees, lapse of the patent, change of ownership, withdrawal of the application, patent applications entering the national phase, patents which have been opposed or revoked, etc.


EPO / PATSTAT Support
Posts: 425
Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:33 pm
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Re: Transfer of ownership

Post by EPO / PATSTAT Support » Tue Feb 28, 2023 10:43 am

Hello Mengfanliu,

There is no comprehensive good way to identify all transfers of ownership after a patent is granted. And there is even less information on "purchases" of patent(s).
Reported events in INPADOC should normally have a code that has been flagged as an event category = 'R'.
(See INPADOC completeness overview: mapping-data-completeness-of-patstat-gl ... ls231-7984 )

Specific for applications filed at the EPO:
If (and when) the patent is granted, and a transfer of ownership took place before the "latest" publication, then the "new" owner will appear on the latest publication. (See table tls206_person in combination with tls227_pers_publn table, and observer differences in the applicant name from for example the A1 document versus the B1 document.)
If a transfer of ownership took place after the latest publication, then you will normally not find that information in the PATSTAT Global tls206_person table, neither in PATSTAT Register.

Transfers of ownership (or changes of addresses) BEFORE the latest publication will also be visible in the reg107_parties table. A new "set" will be created for every change. The problem is that also small changes such as punctuation or an address change will be flagged as a "NEW" party.

Changes of ownership AFTER a grant (or after a latest publication) will normally only be visible in the INPADOC data if the respective patent authority has provided the EPO with such data. (This goes as well for the pure national applications as the granted EP applications that have entered the national phase !) In many countries there is no legal obligation to register ownership changes. And many countries do not provide the EPO with change of ownership data, even when it is registered in the national patent registers.

For EP applications: if you use the INPADOC data, the same codes are used for "APPLICANT DATA CHANGED" as wells "RIGHTS OF AN APPLICATION TRANSFERRED" (RAP1, RAP2, RAP3, RAP4). The only way to distinguish between both would be to compare the names which would allow to exclude the "changes of the address". But it would not be possible to exclude a simple name change from a transfer of ownership.

The same problem occurs for many other patent authorities, so you will need to look into the specific codes for those countries relevant for your study.

On the same topic: one should also keep in mind "licences" which can provide similar rights as a transfer; a patent transfer will give all proprietary rights by the patent owner to the new patent owner but a license can also provide similar extensive rights to work the invention. In INPADOC you will find "licence related event codes" being flagged in event_category_code = 'S'.
Here is some SQL that illustrates the above:

Code: Select all

***** Script for SelectTopNRows command from SSMS  ******/
SELECT  tls201_appln.appln_auth + tls201_appln.appln_nr, tls201_appln.appln_filing_date,
tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_auth, tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_code, tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_descr, 
event_category_code, event_category_title,party_type, party_new, party_old
FROM 
tls201_appln join tls231_inpadoc_legal_event on tls201_appln.appln_id = tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.appln_id
join tls803_legal_event_code on tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_code = tls803_legal_event_code.event_code
and tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_auth = tls803_legal_event_code.event_auth
where party_old <>  party_new and party_new <> '' and party_old <> '' and appln_filing_year = 2020
order by appln_filing_date desc, tls201_appln.appln_auth + tls201_appln.appln_nr

Code: Select all

SELECT  tls201_appln.appln_auth + tls201_appln.appln_nr, tls201_appln.appln_filing_date,
tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_auth, tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_code, tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_descr, 
event_category_code, event_category_title,party_type, party_new, party_old
FROM 
tls201_appln join tls231_inpadoc_legal_event on tls201_appln.appln_id = tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.appln_id
join tls803_legal_event_code on tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_code = tls803_legal_event_code.event_code
and tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_auth = tls803_legal_event_code.event_auth
where tls231_inpadoc_legal_event.event_code like 'rap%' and appln_filing_year = 2020
order by appln_filing_date desc, tls201_appln.appln_auth + tls201_appln.appln_nr
You will find some more forum posts on this topic, but the conclusions is that there is no silver bullet.
PATSTAT Support Team
EPO - Vienna
patstat @ epo.org


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