INPADOC/Family and Legal Status
The INPADOC/Family and Legal Status database is produced by the European Patent Office (EPO) and describes patents issued by 101 countries and patenting organisations. The International Patent Documentation Center (INPADOC) was formed in 1972 with the support of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to provide a centralised bibliographic source for patent documents. INPADOC is now part of the European Patent Documentation System operated by the European Patent Office (EPO).
INPADOC contains information on more than 80 million patents and 150 million legal status actions. It includes abstracts and search reports (cited patents and cited literature references) from key patenting offices such as EPO, WIPO, Japan, and the United States.
Each INPADOC record covers the bibliographic data for a single patent, and legal status actions if applicable. When a single patent record is displayed, Dialog gathers equivalent patents that share common priorities and builds the patent table. This patent table provides an overview of the family members and includes patent country, number, kind and date for each patent in the family, its corresponding local application number and date. While viewing the patent table, any member may be expanded to reveal its bibliographic data. Bibliographic data consists of patent title, generally available in one or more languages, patent assignees and inventors,
International Patent Classification (IPC) codes, Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) codes (from 2013 forward), European Classification (ECLA) codes (through 2012), national classification codes such as Japanese FI terms and F terms, and US class codes. For European and PCT patents, designated states are also provided.
Legal status actions are provided for records from 50 countries and include the gazette date announcing the action, the legal status code, the equivalent text description, and notes which include the date on which the action was added to the database.
Subject Coverage
INPADOC/Family and Legal Status covers all areas of technology patented in the participating countries. Participating countries are listed in the Sources section.
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