- Email: [email protected]
News on patent, trademark and design databases on the Internet
World Patent Information 33 (2011) 397–398
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
World Patent Information journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worpatin
News on patent, trademark and design databases on the Internet
Australia has introduced version 2.0 of its Auspat patent database, at http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/. The database now includes full specifications, as opposed to linking to the copies in the older databases. This sees a significant increase in content, as the database now contains full specifications dating back to the beginning of the unified Australian national patent system in 1904. At present documents from the period 1904-1920 can only be searched by number, or by the full text search. A sample search for an applicant name in the full document texts, however, found all relevant documents discovered by a prior search of the paper indices. At the time the update was made available, a small number of specifications from the final weeks of 1998 were still missing and could only be retrieved via the legacy systems. Other additional functionality consists of a proximity search A/n/B, to find uses of term A and term B within n words of one another, and links to file wrappers, with some exclusions to protect personal data and copyright content. China has a new official English-language patent and utility model database at http://59.151.99.140/sipo_EN/search/tabSearch. do?method¼init, covering the whole period since 1985. It can be searched by publication or application number, publication or application date, priority, title, abstract, IPC, applicant, inventor or agent. Date range searches require the use of the word "to" between the dates. Boolean searches require the use of symbols instead of word operators: * for AND, þ for OR, and - for NOT. It is possible to pick which field the results are sorted by, but unusually this is placed on the search page rather than the result list page. Machine translation is offered for all documents, but currently appears not to be functioning for utility models with application dates before 2006, and occasionally leaves entire paragraphs untranslated. There is currently no apparent means of directly retrieving the original Chinese-language document. The European Patent Office has placed the complete travaux préparatoires for the European Patent Convention 1973 online in pdf form, at http://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/archive/ epc-1973/traveaux.html, arranged by article. Unfortunately the pdf files have been scanned as images and the text is not selectable or searchable. Espacenet has added legal status information for Colombia since 2003 and Slovakia since 2010. Citations are also available for Japanese documents published from 1972 to 1997. (Note that due to the Japanese patent system, citations are only available for applications that reach the examined application publication stage.) The Finnish patent database at http://patent.prh.fi/patinfo/ default2.asp has since October 2010 included file wrappers, available from the individual patent record page. File wrappers are available for applications made since 2001.
doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2011.06.003
French trade mark material is now available on the OHIM TMView database at http://www.tmview.europa.eu/. This means that the database now hosts national data for four out of the five largest EU economies, with the exception of Germany. The national French trade mark database at http://bases-marques.inpi.fr/ now offers Vienna Classification searching. There is a new simple search page offering Vienna Classification searches only with optional narrowing by Nice Classification, and a search box for the Vienna Classification has been added to the advanced search page. The German DPMARegister status database has now been extended to cover registered designs, at http://register.dpma.de/ DPMAregister/gsm/uebersicht. The "beginner’s search" allows searching by number, registration date, description, owner, and Locarno classification. The advanced search allows more complex Boolean search statements and a wider range of search field possibilities. It is possible to customise the result list to show any choice of number, product description, image, dates, number of images supplied, owner, classes, designer, representative, and status. A "monitoring" search allows a quick automated search for all new designs by an owner and/or within a Locarno class published within the current or previous week or month. The Hungarian IP Office has made its status register of all IP applications, including copyright, available at http://epub.hpo.hu/ e-nyilvantartas/?lang¼EN. The English-language search allows searching by number, title, mark text, name of applicant or inventor, and application, grant or publication date range. The information available is mostly, but not entirely, translated into English. The result list can be displayed with headline information in row format, or in a picture format as a mosaic display of illustrations. It can also be filtered according to type of IP. There is no explicit statement of coverage but it appears to cover a long period of retrospective time. There are no direct links to patent documents. The Indian Manual of Patent Office Practice and Procedure is now available online in both pdf and linked hypertext formats at http://ipindia.nic.in/ipr/patent/manual/main%2520link.htm. The Legal Information Institute of India has launched its web site at http://liiofindia.org/, offering free access to a wide range of legislation, decisions and journal articles, including both national and state levels. India now has file wrappers available on its application status database at http://124.124.193.234/applicationstatus/ applicationstatus.aspx. To see what documents are available, click the "View Documents" button at the bottom of a record. It has been reported that what documents are available is extremely variable. The Montenegro IP office now has a web site at http://www. ziscg.me/. At present there do not appear to be any databases of IP publications or rights available.
398
News on patent, trademark and design databases on the Internet / World Patent Information 33 (2011) 397–398
OHIM now offers a new combined search tool, available at http://esearch.oami.europa.eu/copla/index/. The basic search can be used to search Community Trade Marks and Community Designs. However, it only searches mark text and proprietors, not the titles of designs or the goods and service statements for trade marks. The result list is divided into four sections, covering trade marks, designs, proprietor records and legal representative records. The advanced search offers a very wide range of search possibilities, which can be selected by the user. It also includes apparently combined, but actually separate forms to download official journal issues and search for office decisions. Various options to filter results appear automatically in the results list. It is possible to export result lists as pdf and set up search alerts by RSS. OHIM has also announced that it is possible to automatically create certified copies of trade mark application requests and registration certificates from the detailed record page for the mark on the general CTM-ONLINE database at http://oami.europa.eu/ CTMOnline/RequestManager/en_SearchBasic. Romania has launched a new publication server at http://pub. osim.ro/publication-server/. It contains all patent and utility model publications since 28th January 2011. It is currently searchable by publication number, application number, IPC code, publication date, and document kind. South Africa’s intellectual property office is now part of the Companies & Intellectual Property Commission. The web address has changed to http://www.cipc.co.za, although at present there is no difference in the services available.
The UK Intellectual Property Office has launched a beta version of an improved status database known as Ipsum, at http://www. ipo.gov.uk/p-ipsum/. At present the database contains information on GB and national-phase EP patents applied for since 2008. It is currently searchable by application or publication number only. As well as the previously available status information, it includes details of forms filed, classifications applied, citations and search scope used. It includes original documents relating to the application, but at present only correspondence sent by the IP Office is included. Correspondence sent by applicants or their representatives is currently excluded due to copyright concerns. The full launch of the system will occur in October 2011. The full text of all EP documents, and bibliographic details for Dominican Republic patents since November 2001, have now been added to the WIPO database PatentScope, at http://www. wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/search.jsf. Additionally, the search interface is now available in Korean. The Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval tool to automatically suggest translations of search terms has now been extended to include Chinese, and experimentally Russian, Korean and Portuguese. Philip Eagle The British Library, Business and Intellectual Property Centre, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, UK E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
World Patent Information journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worpatin
News on patent, trademark and design databases on the Internet
Australia has introduced version 2.0 of its Auspat patent database, at http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/. The database now includes full specifications, as opposed to linking to the copies in the older databases. This sees a significant increase in content, as the database now contains full specifications dating back to the beginning of the unified Australian national patent system in 1904. At present documents from the period 1904-1920 can only be searched by number, or by the full text search. A sample search for an applicant name in the full document texts, however, found all relevant documents discovered by a prior search of the paper indices. At the time the update was made available, a small number of specifications from the final weeks of 1998 were still missing and could only be retrieved via the legacy systems. Other additional functionality consists of a proximity search A/n/B, to find uses of term A and term B within n words of one another, and links to file wrappers, with some exclusions to protect personal data and copyright content. China has a new official English-language patent and utility model database at http://59.151.99.140/sipo_EN/search/tabSearch. do?method¼init, covering the whole period since 1985. It can be searched by publication or application number, publication or application date, priority, title, abstract, IPC, applicant, inventor or agent. Date range searches require the use of the word "to" between the dates. Boolean searches require the use of symbols instead of word operators: * for AND, þ for OR, and - for NOT. It is possible to pick which field the results are sorted by, but unusually this is placed on the search page rather than the result list page. Machine translation is offered for all documents, but currently appears not to be functioning for utility models with application dates before 2006, and occasionally leaves entire paragraphs untranslated. There is currently no apparent means of directly retrieving the original Chinese-language document. The European Patent Office has placed the complete travaux préparatoires for the European Patent Convention 1973 online in pdf form, at http://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/archive/ epc-1973/traveaux.html, arranged by article. Unfortunately the pdf files have been scanned as images and the text is not selectable or searchable. Espacenet has added legal status information for Colombia since 2003 and Slovakia since 2010. Citations are also available for Japanese documents published from 1972 to 1997. (Note that due to the Japanese patent system, citations are only available for applications that reach the examined application publication stage.) The Finnish patent database at http://patent.prh.fi/patinfo/ default2.asp has since October 2010 included file wrappers, available from the individual patent record page. File wrappers are available for applications made since 2001.
doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2011.06.003
French trade mark material is now available on the OHIM TMView database at http://www.tmview.europa.eu/. This means that the database now hosts national data for four out of the five largest EU economies, with the exception of Germany. The national French trade mark database at http://bases-marques.inpi.fr/ now offers Vienna Classification searching. There is a new simple search page offering Vienna Classification searches only with optional narrowing by Nice Classification, and a search box for the Vienna Classification has been added to the advanced search page. The German DPMARegister status database has now been extended to cover registered designs, at http://register.dpma.de/ DPMAregister/gsm/uebersicht. The "beginner’s search" allows searching by number, registration date, description, owner, and Locarno classification. The advanced search allows more complex Boolean search statements and a wider range of search field possibilities. It is possible to customise the result list to show any choice of number, product description, image, dates, number of images supplied, owner, classes, designer, representative, and status. A "monitoring" search allows a quick automated search for all new designs by an owner and/or within a Locarno class published within the current or previous week or month. The Hungarian IP Office has made its status register of all IP applications, including copyright, available at http://epub.hpo.hu/ e-nyilvantartas/?lang¼EN. The English-language search allows searching by number, title, mark text, name of applicant or inventor, and application, grant or publication date range. The information available is mostly, but not entirely, translated into English. The result list can be displayed with headline information in row format, or in a picture format as a mosaic display of illustrations. It can also be filtered according to type of IP. There is no explicit statement of coverage but it appears to cover a long period of retrospective time. There are no direct links to patent documents. The Indian Manual of Patent Office Practice and Procedure is now available online in both pdf and linked hypertext formats at http://ipindia.nic.in/ipr/patent/manual/main%2520link.htm. The Legal Information Institute of India has launched its web site at http://liiofindia.org/, offering free access to a wide range of legislation, decisions and journal articles, including both national and state levels. India now has file wrappers available on its application status database at http://124.124.193.234/applicationstatus/ applicationstatus.aspx. To see what documents are available, click the "View Documents" button at the bottom of a record. It has been reported that what documents are available is extremely variable. The Montenegro IP office now has a web site at http://www. ziscg.me/. At present there do not appear to be any databases of IP publications or rights available.
398
News on patent, trademark and design databases on the Internet / World Patent Information 33 (2011) 397–398
OHIM now offers a new combined search tool, available at http://esearch.oami.europa.eu/copla/index/. The basic search can be used to search Community Trade Marks and Community Designs. However, it only searches mark text and proprietors, not the titles of designs or the goods and service statements for trade marks. The result list is divided into four sections, covering trade marks, designs, proprietor records and legal representative records. The advanced search offers a very wide range of search possibilities, which can be selected by the user. It also includes apparently combined, but actually separate forms to download official journal issues and search for office decisions. Various options to filter results appear automatically in the results list. It is possible to export result lists as pdf and set up search alerts by RSS. OHIM has also announced that it is possible to automatically create certified copies of trade mark application requests and registration certificates from the detailed record page for the mark on the general CTM-ONLINE database at http://oami.europa.eu/ CTMOnline/RequestManager/en_SearchBasic. Romania has launched a new publication server at http://pub. osim.ro/publication-server/. It contains all patent and utility model publications since 28th January 2011. It is currently searchable by publication number, application number, IPC code, publication date, and document kind. South Africa’s intellectual property office is now part of the Companies & Intellectual Property Commission. The web address has changed to http://www.cipc.co.za, although at present there is no difference in the services available.
The UK Intellectual Property Office has launched a beta version of an improved status database known as Ipsum, at http://www. ipo.gov.uk/p-ipsum/. At present the database contains information on GB and national-phase EP patents applied for since 2008. It is currently searchable by application or publication number only. As well as the previously available status information, it includes details of forms filed, classifications applied, citations and search scope used. It includes original documents relating to the application, but at present only correspondence sent by the IP Office is included. Correspondence sent by applicants or their representatives is currently excluded due to copyright concerns. The full launch of the system will occur in October 2011. The full text of all EP documents, and bibliographic details for Dominican Republic patents since November 2001, have now been added to the WIPO database PatentScope, at http://www. wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/search.jsf. Additionally, the search interface is now available in Korean. The Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval tool to automatically suggest translations of search terms has now been extended to include Chinese, and experimentally Russian, Korean and Portuguese. Philip Eagle The British Library, Business and Intellectual Property Centre, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, UK E-mail address: [email protected]