With the proliferation of patents and licences with overlapping and competing rights, the ability to interpret and filter patent documents has never been more important. Recently, Australian start-up CAMBIA has improved access to patent texts by creating "Patent Lens" an open source, freely accessible IP database that contains a large collection of patent documents from the European Patent Office (EPO), the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).
Patent Lens enables searching of the full text of patent documents from the EPO, the USPTO and the WIPO to be performed. Any documents of interest can then be viewed and printed at no cost. Most recently, the full text of over 115,000 Australian granted patents and over 580,000 pending Australian patent applications were added to the Patent Lens collection of almost 7 million patent documents. The Patent Lens database currently includes the data listed in the table below:
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Office |
Application Data Available |
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WIPO |
Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications (WO-A collection) Bibliographic Data (1978 to the present) PDF images & full text data (1990-2001) |
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EPO |
European Published Granted Patents (EP-B collection) Bibliographic Data (1980 to the present) PDF images & full text data (1990 to the present) |
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USPTO |
US Published Patent Applications (US-A collection) Bibliographic Data (2001 to present) PDF images & full text Data (2001 to present) US Published Granted Patents (US-B collection) Bibliographic Data (1976 to present) PDF images & full text Data (1976 to present) |
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Australian Patent Office |
AU Published Patent Applications (AU-A collection) Bibliographic Data (1998 to present) PDF images & full text Data (1998 to present) AU Published Granted Patents (AU-B collection) Bibliographic Data (1998 to present) PDF images & full text Data (1998 to present) |
The coverage from the USPTO, EPO and Australian Patent Office now includes patent documents in all classifications (IPC 7th Edition). All WIPO applications should be searchable across all classifications within the next few months. Prior to this expansion, Patent Lens covered a subset of classifications related to the life sciences. Patent Lens also integrates INPADOC legal status and patent family information from over 60 countries directly into any search results obtained.
The expansion of the Patent Lens collection to include Australian patent documents is of particular importance as, until now, the full text of these documents has been largely unsearchable. This added transparency will allow Australian and international companies with interests in Australia to assess their inventions with respect to the nature of their competitors’ offerings. It will also enable patent attorneys to conduct more comprehensive novelty, infringement and freedom-to-operate searches.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.