CPC — A New Patent Classification System

In 2010, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) signed a joint agreement to develop a common classification scheme. This new classification system is known as the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) and is similar in structure to the International Patent Classification (IPC).

The CPC is a harmonization effort between the European classification (ECLA) and US classification systems, although initially based on ECLA. The CPC will be adopted globally by over 45 patent offices and will ultimately provide improved prior art searching for patent examiners and for patent searchers.

Read more...

DWPI country coverage update — Changes to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Kind Codes

As a result of customer feedback, the kind code for Gulf Cooperation Council patents in Derwent World Patents Index^® (DWPI^SM) has been changed from B to A to reflect that this is the first stage of publication for records filed through this patent office.

From update 201260 onward, all new GCC patents have the kind code A, with back-file corrections subsequently appearing to change the kind code of records already in DWPI.

Read more...