News on patent, trade mark and design databases on the Internet

摘要

Espacenet has a new "elastic" relevance sorting on the main search page, available by selecting "ranking" as the "sort by" choice. This is intended to avoid the need to use "AND" within concept sub-searches to reduce the noise from the search. The European Patent Register now includes more detailed labels in the file register list screen for cited opposition documents, indicating a number within the title. A correspondence list will also be published to translate these numbers into the citation numbers within the decision (which has separate numeration for documents filed by different parties). France and Malta have now joined the Federated Register service giving direct links to national status databases for national-phase EP patents. The main EP authority file is now available in JSON data format as well as CSV and XML. A complete archive of the European Patent Bulletin is now available online as searchable and selectable pdf documents for the entire run from 1978 to date, when previously pre-2002 issues were only available as scanned pdf images.