An extended patent family is a collection of patent
documents covering a technology. The technical content covered by the
applications is similar, but not necessarily the same. Members of an extended
patent family will have at least one priority in common with at least one other
member - either directly or indirectly.
When building extended patent families, the EPO's automated
process takes into account all the priorities listed in the bibliographic data
on Espacenet.
Therefore, the priorities taken into account are:
- First
filings, provisional first filings and equivalents to first filings (for
definitions of these terms, see above)
- Priorities
that refer to an earlier, related application, whether a domestic or a PCT
filing
EPO products and services that show
extended patent families:
- In
Espacenet the INPADOC extended patent family is shown under "INPADOC
patent family"
- The
Open Patent Services (OPS) web service has a dedicated service, the OPS family
service
- In the
European Patent Register fellow extended patent family members are marked as
"Patent family member" in the "Patent family" section
- The
Global Patent Index (GPI) has a heading "INPADOC family", in
"Biblio."
- PATSTAT
indicates the extended patent family
- There
is no bulk data set that indicates extended patent families
This information is updated weekly (over the weekend).
