Data: Table of Contents

What is Data?

This section gives details to the patent and trademark data sources behind IP Pilot. They include both filings and representative data.

Patents

Underlying dataset

Our main dataset is DOCDB, a comprehensive worldwide bibliographic database provided by the European Patent Office. We have over 100 million patent applications from 120+ jurisdictions in our database. These are mostly utility patents and to some small extent, utility models. The coverage is rather similar to data in the European Patent Office’s Espacenet.

For some countries, the dataset is incomplete or not updated. Most importantly, Indian, ASEAN, New Zealand, South Africa and Mexico showed substantial gaps so we have integrated filings from these countries directly.

We then combine information from local registers from all around the world to accentuate the data with agent information. This helps us draw relationships between law firms, and between law firms and their clients. Agent information for some jurisdictions however are left out or not provided in the actual filings; in this instance, we fill the gap as much as possible with information from PCT and regional filings of the same patent family.

FAQs

By representative, we mean any person or entity who is mentioned as an agent on patent or trademark applications. For some jurisdictions, it can also be listed as a correspondent though this is still the representative in most instances.

Usually, the representatives are law firms or attorneys/lawyers as employees of IP law firms. However, in some countries, there is a distinction made between an agent and an attorney. In others, regular lawyers are also allowed to represent their clients before IP offices. Moreover, the representative is not always an external firm/person. Corporates employ attorneys in their IP department and represent applications internally. Because of all these variations, it would be most accurate to call any listed person or entity as a “representative.” Since we are trying to make the wordings as simple as possible, we indicate “law firm” whenever possible and “representative” whenever a law firm would not be correct or not comprehensive enough.

We receive the raw data from our data providers on a daily basis. Before integrating the information into our software, the raw information need to be cleaned, processed, and enriched. This step requires algorithms to run on the full dataset which overall takes almost a week. Hence, barring unforeseen circumstances, we run an update at the very least once every month, sometimes more often.

In general, our database contains all representatives for which we can find at least 1 publicly-available patent application since 1980. Majority of IP representatives are reflected in the raw data that we process too. However there are scenarios which preclude us from including some law firms and/or representatives:

  • Representative information that are not made known in the application documents.
  • When a law firm is only active on national level and agent information is not available for this country.

Trademarks

Underlying dataset

We have over 170 million trademark filings from 180+ jurisdictions in our database. All prominent jurisdictions are covered.

Trademark data is different in comparison to patent data. Most importantly, trademarks cannot be easily combined into “trademark families” by using priority filing information. However, in order to display case exchange relations between firms, we had to artificially create those families. This algorithm is based on several factors/data fields such as filing dates, verbal elements, applicant names, and Nice classes. While we are able to connect the vast majority into proper families, it is (and will remain) impossible to match all filings internationally. This means that some filings constitute a trademark family of their own and we might also miss international connections in the case exchange section.

Regardless, information in the Standard Search or Overview tab of a Profile are not affected since the connection is irrelevant.

FAQs

By representative, we mean any person or entity who is mentioned as an agent on patent or trademark applications. For some jurisdictions, it can also be listed as a correspondent though this is still the representative in most instances.

Usually, the representatives are law firms or attorneys/lawyers as employees of IP law firms. However, in some countries, there is a distinction made between an agent and an attorney. In others, regular lawyers are also allowed to represent their clients before IP offices. Moreover, the representative is not always an external firm/person. Corporates employ attorneys in their IP department and represent applications internally. Because of all these variations, it would be most accurate to call any listed person or entity as a “representative.” Since we are trying to make the wordings as simple as possible, we indicate “law firm” whenever possible and “representative” whenever a law firm would not be correct or not comprehensive enough.

We receive the raw data from our data providers on a daily basis. Before integrating the information into our software, the raw information need to be cleaned, processed, and enriched. This step requires algorithms to run on the full dataset which overall takes almost a week. Hence, barring unforeseen circumstances, we run an update at the very least once every month, sometimes more often.

In general, our database contains all representatives for which we can find at least 1 publicly-available trademark application since 1980. Majority of IP representatives are reflected in the raw data that we process too. However there are scenarios which preclude us from including some law firms and/or representatives:

  • Representative information that are not made known in the application documents.
  • When a law firm is only active on national level and agent information is not available for this country.
  • When a trademark application is filed under the Madrid protocol and there is no instance of a refusal that requires a domestic agent representative.