Patent dates
Each patent has at least one date on it, usually two, and often three.
- Filing date and grant date have internationally standard meanings and are on almost all our patent documents. An exception to this is the German "Patentirt im Deutschen Reiche vom", which is generally the earliest date to be found on the German patent document and is generally exactly one day, possibly one business day, after the filing date. We often use the "ausgegeben" date for the grant date but it seems that the grant date ("ausgelegt") was often hidden and the "ausgegeben" date means published.[1] Filing date is of international and legal significance relative to priority date references and the provisions of the Convention de Paris pour la protection de la propriété industrielle.
- Full specification filed date is mainly used for Great Britain's Patent Office, which allows the filing of a preliminary patent followed by a more detailed version. Patent GB-1919-144395 is a tidy example of two well-dated and numbered provisional specifications laid out within the original document which culminates in the Complete Specification. (Similar though perhaps not identical procedures were followed in Australia and New Zealand.)
- Publication date is mainly used for the Office de Brevets which gives a date published, usually following the date granted by several weeks. In Austrian patents Ausgegeben clearly introduces the date of publication, following the date granted (Beginn der Patentdauer); in German patents, only the date published is given.[2] British patents, too, had a definite date published, though it is not printed on the patent documents which are found online.[3]
- Patent DE-1928-513003, which reflects protocols later-evolved than most pertinent to our main focus, has "Tag der Bekannmachung über die Erteilung des Patents: 6. November 1930" - "Date of announcement of the grant of the patent: November 6, 1930" and it has the standard "ausgegeben", in this case 1930-11-21. The former is being treated as a date granted. As always, we are dealing with semantics. We are dealing here with an earlier date of "announcement", and a later date of "publication".
On British patents, Espacenet uses this "date accepted", as shown on the original, as "publication data", which is a quirk, relative to the antique usage. How it comes up with "publication data", in the case of patents which were not accepted, we do not know. In the cases in which we have added Espacenet "publication data" as publication date, on British patents, we could remove it, keeping in mind the sourced information above and the relation of this Espacenet "publication data" to the date accepted.
The year in patent page titles on this wiki
Our page titles usually have the year granted, because (a) espacenet does, and (b) national numbering seems to. The exceptions are British patents, Spanish patents, and Hungarian patents. For these we use the FILING year. In Britain this is necessary because they restarted numbering each year, and to use granting year in a title would create name collisions. Australia, it would seem, used a similar system, and records, e.g., Patent AU-1909-16062 as "16062/09".[4]
Now, for some time, we've been using filing date. Espacenet often goes by publication date. This is very precisely and consistently the case with French patents, for instance, occasionally with filing and granting happening on the same year, and publication being in the following year, if not later. In Austrian and other cases the differential is sometimes very extreme. Publication relative to granting, when applicable, is often not perfectly consistent within any one nation's data, and international protocol variability is extreme. Almost all national and international considerations put the emphasis on filing dates. Espacenet doesn't really have a consistent protocol. I think we create a superior interface, in these terms of showing parent-addition relations, and in many ways (while still availing ourselves of what Espacenet does offer). I think the modern offices are really swamped with current items of proprietary interest and treat the antique data, online and offline, somewhat as an afterthought, with all sorts of patchy spots and international variability, in terms of comportment.-JRH
Notes and references
- ↑ In Germany it seems that at least for some period, the date on the printed patent following "Patentirt im Deutschen Reiche vom" is exactly one day after the filing date. (This is not the case in Austria, where priority date matches the date submitted printed on the patent.) So far, in our system, we have reproduced the date printed on the patent, rather than inferring a filing on the preceding day. This last point, of non-inference of the filing date being on the preceding day, is beginning to change. As we shed more light on international patent families, the internationally-recognized priority date, this initial filing date, becomes more important.
- ↑ See Patent DE-1916-310247 which allows the inference that the date granted, though not printed on the published copy, preceded the date Ausgegeben, perhaps typically by a few weeks.
- ↑ That date is a few weeks after the date issued; see Flight, 13 April 1912, p. 338, which lists a group of patents all published on 11 April 1912. This may represent publication in an official gazette.
- ↑ In the case of Australia, however, it seems that the serial numbers reset at the decade, i.e. at the beginning of 1911, rather than each year. Cf. Patent AU-1909-16202 (filed 1909, granted 1910), Patent AU-1909-16634 (filed 1909, granted 1911), and Patent AU-1911-490 (one of the early patents in the new series, filed 23 February 1911).
