The European Patent Office regularly updates its products, such as the patent search system Espacenet and the European Patent Register, with innovative new features and links. The European Patent Register provides procedural and legal data on EP, Euro-PCT and PCT-filings, and within the past year we’ve seen useful updates (such as links to the Belgian, Finnish and Norwegian Patent Registers) added to the system. This month, the EPO released a new set of improvements for the European Patent Register, including:
An RSS feed that lists the latest EP Register Maintenance news.
Additional information about “Appeal following Opposition.”
The option to sort contents in the “Event History” view by date.
Continue reading to learn about these and many other updates recently added to the European Patent Register and the Register Alert system, and also get the latest news about plans to create a Federated Regsiter, which will display the latest official data supplied by the national patent authorities for a selected file in a consolidated table!
July 2013 Updates to the European Patent Register
The EPO website recently posted a set of detailed release notes which describe the latest updates added to the European Patent Register in July 2013:
The URL to the EP Register has been updated to: https://register.epo.org/. Your bookmarks containing ‘/espacenet/’ will be redirected until January 2014, after which they will become invalid.
RSS feeds are now available for EP Register Maintenance news and News flashes.
A new link to the European patent bulletin has been added to the online services menu.
A new link to the European Patent Bulletin is now available on the Register (image from July 2013 Release Notes).
In the “About this file” view, under “Publications,” A1 applications published by WIPO are now linked to the contents of the European publication server in the Result list.
Also in the “About this file” view, additional data is available:
A new section “Appeal following opposition.”
Under the section “Examination procedure” as well as in the “Event history” view, you will now find information about the “Request for correction of the decision to grant filed.”
In the “Legal status” view, there are now tooltip labels indicating the national patent office for each deep link.
A tooltip describing the link to a national register (image from July 2013 release notes).
As in the “All documents” view, you can now sort contents by date in either ascending (default) or descending order in the “Event history” view.
The following updates have been added to Register Alert:
For your monitored applications, you can now change their status to Seen (white dot) or Unseen (black dot) by simply clicking directly on the icon.
Mark applications as “Seen/Unseen” (image from July 2013 Release Notes).
When you click “Report error”, you will be redirected to a contact form with the topic, subject and application number pre-filled.
In the case of Euro-PCT applications, you will now get a message notifying you that an application is already in your monitored list.
See the release notes on the EPO website for additional screenshots of these new features.
A Federated Register
An intriguing new editorial is published on the homepage of the European Patent Register, entitled “The federated Register – coming soon!”:
The European Patent Register will soon offer a new feature – the Federated Register. Just one click and you will get a clear overview of the basic bibliographic and legal status data of a granted EP patent in those designated contracting states that support this service. In other words, the latest official data supplied by the national patent authorities for the selected file will be displayed in a consolidated table.
You will be able to click on the hyperlinked countries to get direct access to the national patent authorities for more details on that EP patent document.
What do you think about these new updates to the the European Patent Register and the recently announced plans for a Federated Register? Let us know in the comments!
This post was contributed by Joelle Mornini. The Intellogist blog is provided for free by Intellogist’s parent company Landon IP, a major provider of patent searches, trademark searches, technical translations, and information retrieval services.