- Espacenet
Espacenet (often written as "esp@cenet") [ "esp@cenet" is a
trademark of the European Patent Organisation (see community trade marks No: 001123876, 000881896, 000881813 on [http://oami.europa.eu/CTMOnline/RequestManager/en_SearchBasic_NoReg "CTM-ONLINE - Trade mark consultation service - Basic"] ).] is a free online service for searchingpatent s andpatent application s. Espacenet was developed by the European Patent Office (EPO) together with the member states of theEuropean Patent Organisation . Every member state has an Espacenet service in its nationallanguage , and access to the EPO's worldwidedatabase , most of which is in English. By the end of2006 , the Espacenet worldwide service contained records on almost 60 million patent publications. [ "In November 2006, Espacenet held data on 56 million patents from 80 countries." - "Espacenet" web site, [http://ep.espacenet.com/help?topic=coverageww "Coverage of the worldwide database"] . Consulted onMarch 27 ,2007 . ]By launching Espacenet in 1996, the EPO is said to have "revolutionized public access to international patent information, releasing patent data from its paper prisons and changing forever how patents are disseminated, organized, searched, and retrieved." [ Michael J. White, [http://www.istl.org/06-summer/electronic3.html "Espacenet" Europe's Network of Patent Databases"] , Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship (ISSN|1092-1206), Number 47, Summer 2006. ]
In 2004, Nancy Lambert considered that, although free, Espacenet, like the
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database of US patents, "still tend [ed] to have primitive search engines and in some cases rather cumbersome mechanisms to download patents." Lambert, N. (2004). " [https://www.infonortics.com/chemical/ch04/slides/lambert-new.pdf Internet patent information in the 21st century: A comparison of Delphion, Micropatent, and QPAT] ", 2004 International Chemical Information Conference & Exhibition, Annecy, France, 17-20 October, 2004, pp 1-2. ] She reported it as being deliberate, on the part of the USPTO and EPO, "who have said they do not wish to compete unfairly with commercial vendors".Example of search
On Espacenet's "Advanced Search" page, searching for an application or for a patent by its PCT application number is done in the following way: one enters, in the "Application number" field, firstly, the letters "WO", then the year of the PCT, then the country of origin and finally the five digit identification code for the patent. For example, "PCT/AU99/00872" would be entered "WO1999AU00872".
Notes and references
See also
*
INPADOC
*International Patent Classification
*Patent classification
*Prior art External links
* [http://www.espacenet.com "Espacenet"]
* [http://www.epo.org/patents/patent-information/free/espacenet.html "Espacenet"] on the European Patent Office web site
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