Registers
EPO (octrooien)
Open Patent Services (OPS) is the web service through which the European Patent Office makes its patent data available over a standardised XML interface using a RESTful architecture. The data are extracted from the EPO's bibliographic, worldwide legal event, full-text and image databases, and therefore come from the same sources as Espacenet and the European Patent Register. That register is the freely accessible source of procedural and legal information on European patent applications and on European patents with unitary effect; the European Patent Organisation has 39 member states.
Go to the publisher’s websiteWhich products consult this source
LEO — Direct consultation
The source is consulted directly while the work is being done.
Availability depends on your organisation’s configuration and access rights.
What this source does not give you
The European Patent Register contains procedural information on European patent applications from the moment they are published — so it holds nothing on applications not yet published. And it stops at grant: the status of a European patent after grant lies with the national patent offices, which supply their data to the Federated European Patent Register.
Legal domains for which LEO consults this source
Dutch legal domains; each link opens the domain page on leo.prudai.com.
Frequently asked questions
- What data does OPS actually deliver?
- The EPO describes it as follows: OPS data are extracted from the Office's bibliographic, worldwide legal event, full-text and image databases, and therefore come from the same sources as Espacenet and the European Patent Register. In practice that means bibliographic data, patent families, legal status events, claims and descriptions, and document images. The EPO publishes an OpenAPI specification alongside the service, together with XSD schemas for, among other things, the DOCDB exchange format, full text, legal status data, the CPC classification and the patent register.
- What does use cost, and are there limits?
- For OPS the EPO publishes a two-tier arrangement: 'non-paying' users get up to 4 GB of data per week free of charge, and anyone exceeding that pays an annual subscription of EUR 2,800 as a 'paying' user. In both cases you must register and obtain access credentials through OAuth. What the EPO regards as appropriate use is set out in its fair use charter and the terms and conditions for OPS. The web interface of the European Patent Register has its own brake: it is not intended for bulk retrieval, limits users to ten search-related actions per minute, and denies access to robots it identifies.
- Can I see here whether a European patent is still in force in the Netherlands?
- Not directly from the EPO data themselves. The European Patent Register follows an application through the EPO's grant procedure; the EPO adds that the register includes links to the patent registers of many member states showing the status of European patents after grant, when national patent offices take over responsibility for them. That combined view is called the Federated European Patent Register, and the information in it is made available by the national offices of the states concerned. So for the question whether a patent is still in force in a particular country — renewal fees, surrender, invalidity — the national register is the source.
- From what moment is an application visible?
- From publication onwards. The EPO describes the European Patent Register as a free service containing procedural and legal information on all European patent applications from the moment they are published, and on Unitary Patents from the moment unitary effect has been requested. Before that moment of publication there is nothing: an application that has been filed but not yet published is invisible through this source. An empty search result therefore does not prove that no application was filed — it only proves that nothing has been published yet.
- What can I read from the register about the state of a case?
- The EPO itself names six things the register answers: what stage in the procedure a European patent application has reached, whether an application has been granted, whether any oppositions to a European patent have been filed, what the correspondence between the EPO and applicants or attorneys contains, whether unitary effect has been requested or registered, and whether a European patent has been opted out of the exclusive competence of the Unified Patent Court. That last point determines which court has jurisdiction in a dispute. For monitoring changes, the EPO offers Register Alert, with which up to 5,000 files can be followed.