Being aware of the legal status of patents is critical in business. It is important to track your own portfolio and to keep an eye on when a competitor’s patents will expire since, once expired, anyone can use the patented technology without fear of infringement and litigation. Hence, Minesoft launched an updated Legal Status Viewer and Timeline for PatBase, the global patent database.

The PatBase Legal Status Viewer is one of the most comprehensive available. IP professionals will no longer need to go through the long, manual process of checking with individual Patent Offices to monitor the legal status of different patents within a family. The Legal Status Viewer combines data from a variety of sources, including information directly from European, American and Japanese National Patent Offices, as well as other legal status data in PatBase data feeds.

Users have different options to view the information. The Timeline & Table options have a streamlined design and convenient export tools making it ideal and easy to share with colleagues and/or clients. In addition, the Priority Relationship diagram makes it simple to spot how patents within a family are related by priority number, again, this is easy to export and share throughout the company (even with non-PatBase users!).

Another time-saving functionality is the ability to show calculated expiry dates for each country. The calculated expiry dates do the hard work for you, taking into account not just the different patent terms for each country and type of document, but also additional information (where available), e.g. Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPCs) and Patent Term Extensions (PTEs).

In the Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical area, the length of the patent term can vary where SPCs or PTEs apply. Therefore, it is important to be aware of which patents are affected by these extensions. Companies can apply for SPCs/PTEs if the review process by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), or similar, takes longer than the norm. These extensions can increase the life of a patent by up to 5 years. Where available, this information is taken into consideration by the Legal Status Timeline when calculating the Patent Term Expiry.

Tracking the legal status of patents is essential for any innovation-based industry. For PatBase users, there is no need to waste time and resources monitoring patent status. The Legal Status Viewer does all the hard work, combining several sources of business-critical legal status information on one easy-to-use resource.

Press contact: Caitlin Kavanagh ([email protected])