Prior Art Searchon the Internet
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The search – information is valuable
A search will help you to check whether your idea for a technical invention is new
and whether or not a patent application or utility model application has been filed
for the invention. You can find out the current state of the art with respect to your
invention.
You seek protection for your technical invention?
Before you apply for a patent or a utility model you should know about prior art
with respect to your invention. Are there any existing IP rights in this field? Is there
a risk that your application might unintentionally infringe an existing patent? Do
you also wish to avoid double developments and double inventions? Then you
should conduct a thorough search. You can perform the search comfortably on the
Internet.
DEPATISnet provides access to the electronic DEPATIS document archive (German
patent information system) of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA).
DEPATISnet allows you to search in all German patent documents since 1877.
Furthermore, the documents of the most important other patent offices and organ-
isations in the world are available to you – over 73,4 million documents with at least
one PDF file, a full text or an abstract and more than 104 million data records in total.
What forms part of the state of the art with regard to a patent?
An invention is new if it does not form part of the state of the art. The state of the
art comprises all knowledge made available to the public by every conceivable
means, anywhere in the world, before filing the application. This includes technical
literature as well as lectures and, in particular, all published patent applications
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and utility models. The state of the art also includes pre-publications, for example,
conference contributions, articles in scientific journals and presentations at trade
fairs. Any information published by you also forms part of the state of the art. It
is absolutely essential that you as inventor make sure that your invention is kept
secret before filing the application.
Searches – why?
• novelty searches to assess the likelihood of a patent being granted or to save
development costs;
• overview searches
- to gain a broad overview of a technological field
- to collect material for your own development work
- to obtain examples on how to formulate your own patent application
- to assess the added value of appointing a patent attorney;
• monitoring searches to find and watch competitors, cooperation partners, com-
panies for commercial exploitation or licensees for your invention;
• “freedom-to-operate” searches to identify valid IP rights which might be infringed
by your product if placed on the market;
• patent searches to complement the usual literature searches for research projects;
• historical searches, for example, for writing a family or company history, to docu-
ment inventive activity by conducting a name search or to find out the state of
the art at a specific time in the past.
Things you should think about:
Generally, you need to have a lot of experience to perform patent searches. This
brochure aims at giving you a first impression of the complexity of these searches.
Please note: an initial prior art search can give you only a first overview. If the
search result is intended as a basis for important – possibly costly – decisions, you
should consult an expert who can provide professional assistance to you in perfor-
ming your searches. This will help you to avoid incomplete and distorted results.
Where to find support for your patent search?
• patent information centres
• patent information providers
• providers of patent search services
• patent attorneys and lawyers
These service providers carry out prior art searches of a more complex nature or
offer access to external commercial patent databases and other technical databases.
The assisted search and the interactive remote search support service “Info-Lotse”
of the patent information centres can help you with your searches.
Patent attorney and lawyers assist you in interpreting your search results and answer
questions about IP infringement.
Lists of addresses and links are available from our customer services or at
www.dpma.de/english.
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Quick guide to the Beginner’s searchof DEPATISnet
1. Choose the search mode “Beginner” on the DEPATISnet-home screen at
https://depatisnet.dpma.de.
2. Enter keywords
In the “Title” search field, you can enter one or several keywords that might occur
in the documents. If you enter more than one keyword, all words are automatically
combined by the “AND” operator.
You can also use wildcards:
? = any number of characters
! = precisely one character
# = one character or no characters
If your search for the title has not been successful, enter the keyword in the field
“Search in full text”. Please use the Expert search to perform searches with several
keywords in this search field. Searching the full text is possible for German (DE),
European (EP) and international (WO) documents. For all other foreign-language
documents, “Search in full text” means that a search is performed only in the title
and, in some cases also, in the abstract.
Hint: Use also synonyms to cover a wide range of different search terms. For example,
search for “Wärmeaustauscher” (heat exchanging device) in addition to “Wärme-
tauscher” (heat exchanger) or for “Druckereierzeugnis” (printing press product) in
addition to “Druckerzeugnis” (print product).
Hint: You can set the number of columns in your result list before conducting your
search. We recommend the following configuration:
Publication number
IPC main class
Search file IPC
Title
Application date
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By selecting the fields “Search file IPC” and “IPC main class”, IPC symbols of the
International Patent Classification (IPC) will be displayed in your result list. You can
use these IPC symbols for your subsequent searches. The IPC is a system to classify
technical subjects. Using an IPC symbol makes it easy to find patent documents
that are classified in a standardised way in the databases even if the documents are
in a foreign language. More details about the International Patent Classifikation are
available on page 16.
3. Start search
You will receive a result list:
Read the titles or open the original documents to find out what classes might be
important for you.
4. International Patent Classification
Click on the IPC symbols which you think are suitable. The International Patent
Classification (IPC) opens in a new window. In the IPC index, a definition is shown
next to the IPC symbol. All patent documents of a specific technological field are
organised according to the same IPC symbols.
Hint: Tick the box “DEKLA groups” in the “View options” section and press “Execute”.
In many cases this will return additional subdivisions of a refined classification
assigned by the examiner. This refined classification of the IPC is called DEKLA.
More information on the “DEKLA groups” is available in the DEPATISnet online
help pages.
Alternatively, you can search for kexwords in the IPC by using the menu item „IP
search“..
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5. Select an IPC class for the search
If you have identified the relevant class, you can select this class by clicking on the
search icon to the left of the IPC symbol.
The selected class automatically appears in the search field of the Beginner’s search.
Start search by the selected IPC symbol.
Now, the search will find all documents (also foreign-language documents) con-
taining this IPC class.
More than 1,000 results – what to do?
Even if your search has returned more than 1,000 results, only 1,000 hits are dis-
played in the result list. The list shows a random selection of results.
If your search returns more than 1,000 results, please narrow your search. Return to
the Beginner’s search.
Here, you can enter, for example,
• DE in the search field “Publication number” to narrow your search to find only
German publications
and/or
• a date in the search field “Publication date” to limit the search results to a specific
time period, for example, j-2009 (only documents from the year 2009).
You can further refine your search by entering a date range. This only makes sense
if you want to limit the results displayed to under 1,000 results in total:
• q1-2009 (documents from the first quarter of 2009)
• m01-2009 (documents from January 2009)
• kw01-2009 (documents from the first calendar week in 2009)
Note: You can narrow the number of results in the Expert search by combining
longer time periods and additional search terms as well as further options to suit
your needs.
Example: The example below shows a result list which is returned when limiting
the search for IPC symbols to the publication year 2009. The search request was:
“Find all documents containing the IPC symbol F24H/1/18 in all searchable IPC
fields as well as the publication year 2009.”
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The function “Replace family members”
Click on “Replace family members” to reduce the number of data records displayed
in your result list: only one family member per patent family will be displayed. See
page 7 for more information on the patent family.
Important: Use this function only if the total number of results returned does not
exceed 1,000.
6. Display results from the list
The result list provides various options to view your search result in detail:
• the bibliographic data in HTML format are displayed by clicking on the link in
the column “Publication number”:
The most important data of the patent document which you wish to view in detail
are displayed in a standardised form.
• the original document as PDF file
• the searchable text as PDF file
bibliographic data original document
7. Display of the bibliographic data
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8. Display of the patent publication as original document in PDF format
9. Load full document
If you have loaded the full document, all pages of the original document can be
viewed, printed or saved as file without delay.
Note: You can search for keywords also in the text-based PDF document of German
patent documents published since 12 June 2014.
Useful tips and background information on the patent search
Term of protection of patents and register display:
• As a rule, a patent application is published 18 months after the filing date or the
priority date, as the case may be, and is searchable from that date.
• Granted patents can be renewed by the owner for up to a maximum of 20 years
from the filing date.
• If a patent has been granted for a medicinal product or plant protection prod-
uct, the owner may apply for a supplementary protection certificate to extend
protection for a maximum of a further five years (5.5 for medicinal products for
paediatric use).
• Registered utility models can be maintained for up to a maximum of ten years
from the filing date.
• The DPMAregister database can be consulted for information on the legal status
(procedural status) in Germany of German patent applications, patents and
utility models and European patent documents as well as international PCT
patent applications in respect of which Germany (DE) has been designated as a
contracting state and which were filed after 1988. Click on “Publication number”
to open the “Bibliographic data” screen. Then click the button “register display”
at the bottom right of that page. All procedural / legal status information will be
displayed and you can check whether a patent or utility model is in force, has
lapsed or whether it was cancelled or withdrawn.
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• For information on the legal / procedural status of foreign IP rights, which you
have found as documents in DEPATISnet, please consult the patent registers of
the respective patent offices or organisations.
Structure of patent documents
A patent document (publication of the patent application = Offenlegungsschrift,
patent specification, utility model specification) usually consists of the following
elements:
• The abstract outlines the core of the invention.
• The description depicts the state of the art and states the disadvantages of the
former technical solutions and the advantages of the invention shown over the
state of the art. The text describes how the invention works. Concrete technical
embodiments are explained by examples.
• The claims determine the scope of protection – that means which parts of the
invention enjoy legal protection.
• The drawings show the invention and its essential characteristics.
International Patent Classification (IPC)
Almost every patent document in DEPATISnet is classified and in this way assigned
to one or several fields of technology. For this purpose, the International Patent
Classification (IPC) is used. The IPC is mapping the entire technical knowledge in a
hierarchically structured classification. The IPC is used by most patent offices in the
world to classify applications in the respective fields of technology.
Patent family
Patent applications and utility models may be linked in a patent family by a common
priority. When the first patent or utility model application is filed for an invention
at a patent office (usually, at the office of the country in which the applicants have
their residence principal or place of business), the one-year priority period starts
to run. During that priority period, the applicants can file subsequent applications
at other offices without running the risk that their first application will be cited
against them as being detrimental to novelty by those offices.
Example: For a first application in Germany filed on 1 August 2012, later identical
applications may be filed in member states of the Paris Convention (e.g. the United
Kingdom, the USA or the European Patent Office) until 1 August 2013. These appli-
cations will then also be displayed in the result list of a search.
In DEPATISnet you can cancel documents which belong to the same patent family
from the result list. Then, only one document per patent family will be displayed.
If you have not found any relevant documents, there may be two reasons for this:
• The search was too vague.
• There are currently no or only very few publications in this field.
For detailed search options please use the Expert search. Information on the Expert
search is available in the DEPATISnet help pages.
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Any questions? Contact us.
We will be pleased to answer your questions and provide detailed information on
prior art searches and further search options.
Phone +49 89 2195-3435
Monday to Thursday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
E-mail [email protected]
For further information on patent searches and more useful tips please visit our
website at www.dpma.de/english in the section Patents / Patent Information and
Patents / Search and in particular the service pages and help pages of the database.
The German Patent and Trade Mark Office also offers the following services to
users of our databases and electronic services, for which a fee is charged:
• Workshops: https://www.dpma.de/dpma/veranstaltungen/workshops (in Ger-
man)
• The use of DEPATIS in the search room: https://www.dpma.de/english/
services/customer_care_services/search_rooms
The most important databases at a glance:
DEPATISnet https://depatisnet.dpma.de
DPMAregister https://register.dpma.de
Published by
Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt
Zweibrückenstraße 12
80331 München
Phone +49 89 2195-1000
www.dpma.de/english
Last update
April 2018
Picture credit
Fotolia.com: Pavel Timofeev