Espacenet (formerly stylized as ''esp@cenet'') is a free
online service for searching patents and
patent applications. Espacenet was developed by the
European Patent Office (EPO) together with the member states of the
European Patent Organisation. Most member states have an Espacenet service in their national
language, and access to the EPO's worldwide
database, most of which is in English. In 2022, the Espacenet worldwide service claimed to have records on more than 140 million patent publications.
History
By launching Espacenet in 1998, the EPO is said to have "revolutionized public access to international patent information, releasing patent data from its paper prisons and changing forever how patents are disseminated, organized, searched, and retrieved."
In 2004, i.e. in the early years of Espacenet, Nancy Lambert considered that, although free, Espacenet, like the
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database of US patents, "still tend
dto have primitive search engines and in some cases rather cumbersome mechanisms to download patents."
[Lambert, N. (2004). ]
Internet patent information in the 21st century: A comparison of Delphion, Micropatent, and QPAT
'', 2004 International Chemical Information Conference & Exhibition, Annecy, France, 17–20 October 2004, pp 1–2. She reported it as being deliberate, on the part of the USPTO and EPO, "who have said they do not wish to compete unfairly with commercial vendors".
In 2009, Espacenet offered the so-called SmartSearch which allows a query to be composed using a subset of
Contextual Query Language (CQL).
In 2012, the EPO launched "Patent Translate", a free online automatic translation service for patents. Created in partnership with
Google, the translation engine was "specifically built to handle complex and technical patent vocabulary", using "millions of official, human-translated patent documents" to train the translation engine. It covers translations between English and 31 other languages. According to the ''
Patent Information News magazine published by the EPO, a 2013 independent study compared Espacenet with DepatisNet, Freepatentsonline,
Google Patent
Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications.
Contents
Google Patents indexes more than 87 million patents and patent applications with full text from 17 patent offices, including:
* United States P ...
and the public search facility at the
USPTO. In that study, Espacenet reportedly obtained the highest score for both data coverage and customer support, and the best overall aggregated score.
In March 2016, Espacenet began offering
full-text search through its collection of English, French and German patent documents.
See also
*
Cooperative Patent Classification
*
Global Dossier, a service available via espacenet
*
INPADOC INPADOC, which stands for International Patent Documentation, is an international patent collection. The database is produced and maintained by the European Patent Office (EPO). It contains patent families and legal status information, and is updat ...
*
International Patent Classification
*
Patent classification
*
Prior art
References
External links
* {{official website, http://worldwide.espacenet.com/
Bibliographic databases in engineering
European Patent Organisation
Online databases
Patent search services
Technology websites