Sub Navigation
Promotion
Looking back: 20 years of patent information
21 October 2008
This week the EPO is celebrating
10 years of its free online patent search esp@cenet. Launched in 1998 in
Paris, the tool
is the result of a patent information policy that was implemented at the Office
ten years earlier. Here we look back at 20 years of patent information policy
at the EPO.
Until the 1980s, the EPO did not place much emphasis on patent information. Applications and granted patents were published in accordance with the Office's legal obligations, but little was done to ensure that this information could be used by small companies, lone inventors or individual researchers.
That changed in 1988, when the Administrative Council, reacting to public demand, took the decision that the EPO should act to increase the use of its data by the public and harmonise dissemination across Europe.
As a result, the EPO began to:
- capture national patent and utility model documents in addition to those needed by the EPO;
- develop text-readable databases of patent abstracts in English; and
- enlarge the EPO's databases, with data from around the world, including legal status data.
"The EPO has consistently set the standards for patent information products and services, and has taken the lead in collecting the world's patent information and making it freely available to the world," says Richard Flammer, Principal Director for Patent Information at the EPO.
These activities received a boost in 1997, when the Administrative Council approved the principle of marginal cost pricing for the EPO's products, paving the way for the development of free internet access to the EPO data.
And so, ten years ago this week, EPO President Ingo Kober and European Commissioner Edith Cresson presented esp@cenet to the public for the first time.
"The unparallel achievement of esp@cenet has been to bring patent information out of the exclusive realm of the specialist and place it firmly into the domain of the interested layman," says Mr Flammer.
The database, which covered around 30 million patent documents at the launch, today contains more than double that number. Servers are operated by or on behalf of 30 EPO member states, and esp@cenet has been adopted by many patent authorities globally.
Further information
- Patents: Patent information
- Patent search: esp@cenet
- Publications: Patent information news
- Patent system: 20 years of patent information