CapaxiP

The priority date of a patent relates to the earliest filing date from within a family of patent applications. Protection starts from the priority date and cannot extend more than 20 years from the priority date (in most countries).

The practice in many of the world’s patent systems is to publish patent applications at 18 months from the earliest filing date. The consequence for patent searches and patent alerts is that patent applications filed in the last 18 months are not visible. In some countries however, such as China or Japan, patent applications can be published earlier based on a request from the applicants.

Both are classifications of patents in technical categories (classes):

The CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification) is a joint effort from the EPO (European Patent Office) and the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) to unify their classification systems. CPC comprises around 251.000 codes. The CPC can be browsed here: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/cpc-browser

For alerts, the field identifier “cpc” can be used, for example “cpc=A47L15” to search for dishwashers.

However, please note that the CPC assigned by EPO examiners is usually available a few months after the publication date. This means that you should not search with CPC symbols if you are targeting recently published documents.

The IPC (International Patent Classification) is led by WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and contains about 70.000 codes. Highest levels of both IPC and CPC are similar. Non-extended Asian patents are categorized according to the IPC and not CPC. IPC can be accessed here: https://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/ipcpub/

For alerts, the field identifier “ipc” can be used.

In general, searching only in CPC allows very precise searches (very deep classification) but with limited geographical coverage, while searching using IPC gives a better coverage but does not provide high granularity.

Both systems can be interrogated at the same time using “cl” which is equivalent to “cpc or ipc”, for example “cl=A47L15” to search for dishwashers.

First, as a reminder, the field identifier “pa” (patent applicant) should be used for that purpose, for example “pa=airbus”

Not receiving alerts from a specific company could happen for many reasons :

- Maybe they do not have patents, or their patent applications are not published yet

- Maybe they registered their patents using a different company, or their public name is not their legal name (Gardena products can now only be found by searching pa=husqvarna, the parent company).

We recommend testing your alerts first and contacting us for advice if needed.

Our patent alerts service uses the Espacenet database comprising more than 120 millions patents from more than 90 countries.

The rule is very simple: we will check the database for you on either a daily, weekly or monthly basis, however if there are not new patents you will not get an email from us.