http://worldwide.espacenet.com/
http://patentinfo.european-patent-office.org/index.en.php
https://publications.european-patent-office.org/PublicationServer/search.jsp

How do I put an IPC or EC Class Mark into the EspaceNet Database

An IPC or EC Mark is entered in the following formats,

What are the truncation symbols used?

Truncation is supported in the "Inventor", "Applicant", "Title" and "Title or abstract" fields. The following symbols can be used:

"?" - for a single, optional character
"#" - for a single, compulsory character
"*" - for unlimited right hand truncation

Limitations:
"*" may not be used in a search word with fewer than three characters
"?" or "#" may be used up to 3 times for search words with up to three characters
"?" or "#" may be used up to 7 times for search words of over three characters
no truncation symbols are possible within a search word.

Examples:
car? will retrieve documents containing "car", "cars", "cart", "card", etc
car## will retrieve "carts" and "cards", but not "car" or "cart", etc.
car#? will retrieve "cards", "card" and "cars", but not "car".
colo?r is not allowed because the truncation symbol is located within the search term
co* is not allowed because the search word has only two characters
co???? is not allowed because of the limit of three truncation symbols for search words of fewer than three characters

Where are the definitions of the European Patent Classification System

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/classification?locale=en_EP

I can't get it to print

This could be a frames problem. Some Internet sites use pages with multiple frames in them. Now it is only the active frame that gets printed. If you find that only the left hand margin of the pages are being printed, you will need to highlight a portion of text of the patent you are looking at, and then hit the print button. This will allow you to print that frame. As we are all running Explorer 4 on our computers then this may not be the cause of your problem, so as a next step see below.

I tried that and I still can't get it to print

Ok. There are two print buttons available, one on Internet Explorer (top toolbar, right hand side) and one on Acrobat Reader (second top toolbar, left hand side, first button). If you print using Internet Explorer you will get mostly a blank page. So print using the print button in the Acrobat Reader toolbar, this will work.

I can't get EspaceNet to display the images

In order to have EspaceNet display the images of the patent documents, you must have Acrobat Reader installed on your machine. Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Acrobat Reader is generally a standard installation but is available for installation directly from the Adobe web site. This option is available by clicking on the following links and downloading Adobe's Acrobat Reader 3.02 (ar302.exe) {Windows 95 version} and the ActiveX Addon (ocxinst.exe) {to be able to view EspaceNet patent pages} to a directory on your machine.

If you could not get these files to download from the links above, then use the following links,

Now close all your applications and run these programs, one after the other, and let them install themselves. That should be it, you should now be able to view the EspaceNet images.

This is covered further by EspaceNet's help at EspaceNet Help

Using the "Search UK Patents" I get the response 'no document' when I enter a patent number ... but I know it is there

Each country provides a further database covering their own patents. This database is believed to cover only TWO YEARS worth of data.

What patents are presented first

In the EspaceNet result list (hit-list), all documents retrieved will have a reference document. The reference document is the representative document of the patent family, mostly in English, to which the selected document belongs. In determining the choice of the reference document in English, the EPO selects based on the following selection order, the EP document in English, then the first US document published, then the first GB document published, etc. This is covered by their help section on selection criteria.

I get a listing of patents but it takes so long to load them all

Well the solution here is to put the mouse arrow over the link, press the right mouse button and choose the "Open in New Window" option. Now just repeat this for all the links you want to look at. What will happen is that you will then have a dozen browsers all going at once. You can look at the ones that are already downloaded and while you are doing this the remainder are being downloaded for you, consequently there is no waiting time to access these patents.

How can I speed up the downloading time

One solution is to disable the setting that automatically allows the browser to download images. If it is just down loading text then the download is much faster

Can I get EP Search Reports

Yes. If available, the button (SR) will also be available when you are viewing your EP application. If you just click on it that will give you the search report. If this button is not present then try clicking on the requested patent link, this will bring up the document of original filing. There might be a button called SR here, in that case the search report is available from here.

Another option that is available if they are not on the EspaceNet server is to try the European Patents Server which supplies whole PDF documents for EP Applications from January 2004 ~EP1,200,000.

European Patent Office Patent Information
European Publications Server (Whole PDF Documents)

How do I get family members

The Bibliographic page of patent that is presented by the database provides a number of fields, which are, the requested patent, the patent {presented}, and equivalent {patent application} fields. These fields contain the listing of the patent family members for this application. This is covered by their help on the subject of patent family systems. The family listing maybe incomplete.

What documents does EspaceNet cover?

The EPO's EspaceNet site provides the following full text patent documents on-line.

Each country provides a further database covering their own patents. This database is believed to cover only TWO YEARS worth of data.

EspaceNet provides a database which covers Japanese patent applications made by Japanese applicants. Again this is at http://worldwide.espacenet.com/

Images from JP 48025001 (April 1974)
Bibliographic Information from JP 51127546 (November 1976)
Bibliographic Information and first page images from JP 59010001 (January 1984)

Entry format is JPYYNNNNNN or JPYNNNNNN. Where YY is the year of the Emperor's reign.

EspaceNet has brought another database (B3) online. This B3 database provides the original equivalent patent applications to also be retrieved and displayed. These are available in PDF format as an image. The coverage is,