Patent Information & Classification - Patents - Guides de recherche

Characteristics of Patent Documents

Description and Drawings

The description gives the background to the invention (what was known before the invention, i.e., the "prior art"), and defines the difference between the pre-existent technology and what the invention contributes to technology development. Information includes:

Title of the invention
Statement of patent history
Field of the invention
Summary of the invention in broad terms
Drawings and brief description of the drawings
Detailed description of the invention

Claims

Claims are written statements of what the inventor asserts is his or her exclusive property. They determine the scope of patent protection and define legal boundaries of the invention.

Abstracts

Many patent documents contain an abstract summarizing the contents of the document.

Classification

Patent documents have "classification symbols" to facilitate finding and extracting relevant information from them. Although several classification systems exist, today the International Patent Classification (IPC), which was established by an intergovernmental agreement concluded more than 30 years ago and administered by WIPO, is the most widely applied by all the major industrial property offices.

Date

Patent dates reveal the age of an invention and whether they are still under legal protection. Patent documents may list:

date of application
priority date
date of grant

Inventor, Applicant, Owner

Most patent documents indicate the name and address of at least one or two of the following:

inventor
applicant
patentee (the owner)

Patent Classification Systems

To make searching easier, every patent is classified using a defined scheme. A classification scheme is a system of codes that groups inventions according to technical area, which means similar inventions are grouped under the same classification.

International Patent Classification (IPC)
The International Patent Classification (IPC), established by the Strasbourg Agreement 1971, provides for a hierarchical system of language independent symbols for the classification of patents and utility models according to the different areas of technology to which they pertain.
US Patent Classification System (USPC)
The USPC is a system for organizing all U.S. patent documents and many other technical documents based on common subject matter. The system contains 450 classes and 150,000 subclasses.
Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC)
The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) effort is a joint partnership between the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) where the Offices have agreed to harmonize their existing classification systems (European Classification (ECLA) and United States Patent Classification (USPC) respectively) and migrate towards a common classification scheme.

Patent Families

A patent family is a set of either patent applications or publications taken in multiple countries to protect a single invention by a common inventor(s) and then patented in more than one country. A first application is made in one country – the priority – and is then extended to other offices.

Patent family searches are used in order to:

find the countries in which a given patent application has been filed (if published);
find a "patent family member" that is written in a desired language;
obtain a list of prior art documents or "References Cited"; and
estimate the importance of the invention (by number of patent documents relating to the same invention and being published in different countries or by industrial property organisations).