Patent Documents

Patent documents are published by national, regional or international Patent Offices. Patent documents contain information on inventions, for which a patent is requested or has already been granted, or for which a utility model has been registered. There are a few essential differences between utility models and patents: utility models can only be used to protect products, not processes, a preclusive period to novelty of six months applies, and the duration of validity is shorter.

A patent or utility model confers on its proprietor exclusive rights of use for the invention, though these rights are limited in time and limited in territorial scope. These rights can be sold and licences can be conceded. A patent is often the only means of preventing imitations of products which have been researched, developed and launched at significant cost to the product originator.

Each year, more than one million patent documents are published, based on around half a million inventions. Investigations have shown that only a small proportion of inventions are described in other sources in addition to their appearance in the patent literature. This is why patent information is such an indispensable means of acquiring knowledge on the state of the art, and why it is so important for innovation processes. Here, basic details on patent information and patent databases is available. In all patent databases, you can search for  classifications by subject area of the International Patent Classification.

The majority of the collection (approximately 14 million patent documents) is located in the PIN Reading Room. In addition, the patent documents of the aggregator database QPAT with 40 million patent documents are included in the virtual collections. You can access them on the campus of the LUH.

Please search in one of the databases of QPAT by the known details. The basic setting is FamPat, other databases are listed under Collection List. The patent documents are available in the form of a .pdf file.