Calculated Expiration Date
Calculated expiration dates are available for almost all patent authorities included in INPADOCDB and INPAFAMDB. This data offers options to identify patents which are potentially in force. Calculated expiration dates help users to narrow down FTO search results to active patent families and eliminate old patents which have naturally expired.
Expiration dates of patents reaching the maximum lifetime are typically not available in the INPADOC legal status, except for a small number of countries. For selected patent authorities the INPADOC legal status provides actual expiration dates, which can be used as an additional source of expiration information.
Expiration dates are calculated for publications with an application date from 1980 onwards. This includes patents, utility models, design and plant patents, and all related publication types like standard and short-term patents, re-examinations and reissue patents. PCT applications (WO) do not have a calculated expiration date since there is no grant of an 'international' intellectual property right.
The patent term calculations are based on bibliographic INPADOC data, comprising publication, application, and priority information. According to these calculation requirements, the quality of the calculated patent terms depends on the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the INPADOC data.
The calculated expiration date includes the Patent Term Adjustments days for US patent documents and the Supplementary Protection Certificates, e.g., for DE I2 or NL I2 publications. Not included is the expiry information from the INPADOC legal status, e.g., early patent expiry due to non-payment of annual fees.
Calculated expiration dates are fully searchable with the search field /XPD which can be used to search for dates, date ranges, and open date ranges. Similar functionality is available for the Calculated Expiration Year (/XPY). The field availability XPD/FA indicates the presence of XPD dates.
Patent Term Adjustment (/PTA) is an extension of the terms of a US patent for delays caused by the USPTO during the prosecution of a US utility or plant patent application. The PTA are provided in days and indexed in the field /PTA. The PTA days are included in the calculated expiration date.
Patent Status Indicator
A lifetime status of a patent application is applied for each application in INPADOCDB and INPAFAMDB. The lifetime status is indexed in the field Patent Status Indicator (/STI) and contains one of four possible status entries: ALIVE, DEAD, TRANSITIONAL and INDETERMINATE. The indicator can be used to enhance search, display and analysis functionality in INPADOCDB and INPAFAMDB.
The status of a given application is based on legal events reflected in more than 4,400 codes classified by FIZ Editorial and corresponding gazette dates and/or the calculated expiration date XPD.
Patent term adjustment days for US applications as well as extension or expiration dates for SPCs for more than 25 patent authorities are taken into account in the calculation.
Status Indicator Flags
In order to reflect the status of an application more accurately, not only the obvious indicators ALIVE and DEAD are used, but also the indicators TRANSITIONAL and INDETERMINATE.
An application has the status ALIVE if: 1) it is still under active prosecution or the granted patent is in force, 2) the calculated expiration date has not been exceeded, and 3) the latest available legal event is classified as alive.
An application has the status DEAD if: 1) the calculated expiration date is exceeded, 2) the latest available legal event is classified as a dead event, 3) the application is no longer being pursued, or 4) the rights granted to the IP holder are no longer in force, due to expiry, withdrawal by the IP rights holder, permanent cancellation due to non-payment of fees past any deadlines, etc.
An application has the status TRANSITIONAL if a Lapse or Withdrawal event (e.g., due to non-payment of fees) is the latest available legal event. If no further event occurs, the application turns DEAD 6 months later, but it could also change back to ALIVE again, if, for example a late fee payment event is published. The status TRANSITIONAL is intended to indicate that an application may change to DEAD status and that it should therefore be observed in particular.
INDETERMINATE is exclusively used for granted EP and EA documents and means that the status cannot be determined within the 20 years term after filing. EP and EA applications are affected by a large volume of positive and negative legal events. Examples of relevant events include payment/non-payment of designation or annual fees, extensions, and oppositions. Many of these events relate to only one or a few of the contracting states, but some of them are duplicated by the national offices. Thus, all EPO and EAPO filings will have an INDETERMINATE status for the time being, as any other status would be misleading. EP and EA pre-grant applications can be ALIVE, TRANSITIONAL or DEAD.
Note: EP unitary patents with the kind code EPC0 have the indicators ALIVE, DEAD or TRANSITIONAL, whereas the granted EP patents with kind code EPB1 or EPB2 have the indicator INDETERMINATE. This is the only case where the status indicator is not the same for all members of the national family.
PCT applications are ALIVE for the time a PCT application can enter the national or regional phase.
For authorities for which no legal status data is available, the status DEAD or ALIVE is assigned based on publication data and/or the calculated expiration date.
DEAD applications can change to ALIVE status if the application’s calculated expiration date has not been exceeded. If a lapse or withdrawal legal event occurs, the application enters the 6 month TRANSITIONAL period followed by the DEAD status. In case of a reinstatement legal event, the application’s status will change to ALIVE again.
Time coverage of Status Indicators is from the 19th century to the present. Status Indicator data is updated with every update of INPADOCDB and INPAFAMDB.
Important Note: The value in the Patent Status Indicator field (/STI) is created by the input and logic as described above and represents predicted values. It cannot be guaranteed to be 100% complete and accurate. For a legal opinion a qualified patent attorney should be consulted.
Status Established Date
The Status Established Date (/STED) provides the date on which the status was initially calculated or last changed. For the backfile data, the STED dates reflect timeframe for initial calculation but going forward the dates align with real time legal events, gazette updates and/ or updates to calculated expiration dates.
Monitoring Status Indicators
For the manual monitoring of a status indicator like DEAD it is recommended to search in INPAFAMDB like:
= > S (PN1 OR PN2 OR PN3 OR PN4)/PN (L) DEAD/STI (L) STED>20211001
This retrieves specific all named publication which turned DEAD since the give date.
For an alert STI and STED can be used like this:
= > S (PN1 OR PN2 OR PN3 OR PN4)/PN (L) DEAD/STI (L) STED/LAST
This query retrieves those publication numbers which turned DEAD since the last STED date.
Searching Pending Applications
The combination of the patent status in the field STI with the patent stage in the field STA can be used for searches of pending applications. In this example more than 47% of the retrieved publications dealing with “laser beam” are pending applications whereas over 52% are withdrawn applications.
Displays
The Patent Status Indicator can be displayed in many predefined bibliographic formats and some family formats. The Status Established Date is available only in the formats CFAM, UPALL and as custom display D STED.
Display BIB including the Calculated Expiration Date (XPD), the Patent Term Adjustment days (PTA) and the Patent Status Indicator (STI).
Display CFAM including the Patent Status Indicator (STI) and Status Established Date (STED).
Display CFAM2 including the Patent Status Indicator (STI). All four indicator types are available in this example.