The introduction of the Unitary
Patent (UP) and the Unified
Patent Court (UPC)
will create new data, for example, around the legal status of European patents.
The data relating to unitary effect will be curated and reported in the EPO's
many patent information tools and services, providing users with an additional
layer of patent information. To help users recognise UP-related information in patent
knowledge products, a new marker - "C0" - will signal those patents
for which unitary effect has been registered. Some products, such as the European
Patent Register, Espacenet, etc., will also display a blue icon (
) to indicate that unitary effect has been requested or
registered for a given patent application.
The table below provides an overview of the most prominent UP-related information in selected EPO patent information data, tools and services:
| Product with information on unitary effect | C0 marker displayed | Search for registered UP |
Access to UP Register |
Access to UP file inspection |
Access to UPC | Legal events and opt-out information |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DOCDB in XML | yes | no | no | no | no | no |
| Espacenet | yes | yes | yes | yes [1] | no | yes [2] |
| EP bibliographic data (EBD) | yes | yes | no | no | no | yes |
| European Patent Bulletin | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| EP Bulletin Search | no | yes | yes | yes [1] | yes | yes |
| EP full-text data [3] | no | no | no | no | no | no |
| EP full-text search | no | no | yes [4] | yes [4] | no | yes [2] |
| European Patent Register | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| European Publication Server | no | no | yes [4] | yes [4] | no | yes [4] |
| Global Patent Index (GPI) | yes | yes | yes [4] | yes [4] | no | yes [2] |
| INPADOC worldwide legal event data | yes | no | no | no | no | yes |
| OPS | yes | yes [5] | yes [6] | no | yes [7] | yes [7] |
| PATSTAT | yes | yes | no | no [8] | no | yes |
Using the European Patent Register, you can search for patents for which unitary effect has been requested or registered.
The Register's navigation bar will have a new structure comprising two areas: the European procedure area with submenu items identified by the prefix EP and a new Unitary Patent area with submenu items identified by the prefix UP:
If unitary effect has been requested, the Unitary Patent part will display three submenu items: UP About this file, UP Event history and UP All documents.
You will also notice some changes on the Register's Advanced search interface. Two new search fields will be displayed: Unitary effect request date and Unitary effect registration date. To filter on the basis of granted patents for which unitary effect has or has not been requested or registered, use the operators yes or true, or no or false in the respective fields. Alternatively, you can use the date you are interested in to retrieve the relevant patents.
The same can be done using Smart search. For that, you can use two new field identifiers:
On the search results list, you will find a new Unitary Patent column. This column will display a blue icon to identify patents for which unitary effect has been requested or registered. Clicking on the blue icon will take you directly to the "UP About this file" panel view of the Unitary Patent Register.
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The C0 marker will be associated with the EP number when unitary effect is registered and visible in the various UP panel views.
A new section in the EP About this file panel view - Opt-out from the exclusive competence of the Unified Patent Court - will provide a direct link to the opt-out information held by the UPC.
A record of the information communicated to the European Patent Office concerning proceedings before the Unified Patent Court will be provided under Proceedings before the Unified Patent Court in the UP About this file panel view and will include a direct link to the UPC.
Information regarding European patents with unitary effect will be published in chapter IV of the European Patent Bulletin under the title European patents with unitary effect. You will be able to find most important UP-related legal events here.
Changes, references to deleted data and rectifications relating to previous entries published under IV.1-IV.11 will appear in section IV.12 Alterations and Corrections.
A complete overview of chapter IV's contents can be found in the introduction part A of EP Bulletin (Contents). Some additional information about the sections will be provided in part D (Supplementary Details).
As the list of legal events that will be published in the EP Bulletin's UP chapter is large, amounting to 18 main events and 22 changed or deleted events (IV.12), here are just a few examples of some of them:
IV.1(1) Date of filing of request for unitary effect for the European patent
IV.1(2) Date of withdrawal of request for unitary effect for the European patent
IV.2(1) European patents for which unitary effect is registered (C0)
IV.2(2) European patents for which a request for unitary effect has been rejected
Changes and deletions will be published in section IV.12.
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In this chapter you will find more details on further EPO patent information data, tools and services.
All UP-related information available in the EP bibliographic data (EBD) will be searchable in EP Bulletin search. Special UP-related search criteria, such as those listed below, will be available to help with query building:
For example, the query UAC = * will retrieve all documents where an action has been filed at the UPC.
EP Bulletin search will display all EP- and UP-related information available, for example, side-by-side:
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You can also customise the content of your result list by adding columns that include information of interest to you, e.g. UP-related information:
All EP- and UP-related information can be added in the result list for display and download, e.g. in CSV or XML format.
EP Bulletin search also includes a link to the Register.
In Espacenet, you will be able to use the C0 marker to search for EP patents for which unitary effect has been registered with either of the following queries: pn=EPC0 or EPnnnnnnnC0. Use the latter if you want to search for a specific EPC0 number.
The C0 marker is used for registered UPs and will be visible in the result list and document-related views.
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You will find a new link next to the blue icon
(see Unitary Patent
in the European Patent Register) in the Bibliographic data, Description, Claims
and INPADOC family views providing access to the UP Register.
An EPC0 has no bibliographic data, description, claims, drawings or orginal document of its own. Therefore, the Bibliographic data view of the registered UPs (EPC0) will display the data from the EPB document and the abstract from the EPA document; the Description, Claims, Drawings and Original document views will display the data from the EPB document.
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Use the Legal events view for the legal events relating to the unitary patent.
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UP-related information will be searchable and displayed in Global Patent Index when available in DOCDB and INPADOC. This information includes registered UPs, that is, patents with EPC0 numbers, and information on participating member states. Global Patent Index will also include a link to the Register.
UP-related information will be available in the following bulk data sets: EBD, Register in Bulk, EP full-text, DOCDB in XML, INPADOC in XML.
For European patents with unitary effect the related bibliographic data will be stored in a new group tag - B7000 - and will include all the items described in Rule16 UPR and in the Regulation (EU) No 1257/2012. An XML document with kind="C0" & status="u" (for unpublished) will also be available with the same bibliographic data as the EP-B document.
All the publicly available procedural information on European patent applications as they pass through each stage of the granting process will include the UP-related events that are also reflected in the European Patent Register data.
UP-related information will be made available in the XML bibliographic data of subsequent publications such as B8 and B9 publications (i.e. presence of an element B7000 plus relevant sub-elements - eventually also B920 including Unified Patent Court opt-out information).
The C0 marker is added as a publication step in the bibliographic data and as part of the patent family. The list of member states covered by the Unitary Patent will also be reflected in C0 bibliographic data.
EPO worldwide legal event data (INPADOC) will contain legal events for all stages of the UP procedure here. These events will originate from the EP bibliographic data (EBD), the European Patent Register and the Unified Patent Court.
UP-related information will be available in OPS services. However, while the OPS Published data and Register services will support both UP search and retrieval, in the OPS Legal and Family services only retrieval will be possible.
To search for UPs in the OPS Register service, you can use the same field identifiers as in Register.
UP-related information will then be displayed using the "upp" constituent.
In the OPS Published data service, UP-related information will be displayed using the "biblio" and "equivalents" constituents.
The OPS Legal and Family services will display UP-related information.
For OPS documentation and an OPS manual, see under Further information on the OPS web pages. You can also browse the OPS forum and the OPS FAQ for further information.
Hear from experts and learn more about UP-related topics by watching the EPO's event recordings:
Patent Knowledge Nuggets are a series of short videos that aim to help users understand features of EPO data tools and how to use them. Some of these videos relate to the UP system:
