Patent family

A patent family is "a set of patents taken in various countries to protect a single invention (when a first application in a country – the priority – is then extended to other offices)."[1] In other words, a patent family is "the same invention disclosed by a common inventor(s) and patented in more than one country."[2] Patent families can be regarded as a "fortuitous by-product of the concept of priorities for patent applications".[3]

Patent law
Overviews
Basic concepts
Patentability
Additional requirements
By region / country
By specific subject matter
See also

Definitions

The International Patent Documentation Centre (INPADOC), the European Patent Office (EPO) and WIPO recognize the following definitions of simple and extended patent families:

Simple patent family: All patent documents have exactly the same priority date or combination of priority dates.[4]

Extended patent family: All patent documents are linked (directly or indirectly) via a priority document belonging to one patent family. The extended families allow for additional connectors to link other than strictly priority date. These include: domestic application numbers, countries that have not ratified the Paris Convention, or if the application was filed too late to claim priority.[5]

Those are not the only possible definitions of a patent family, however. Another definition, which is broader than the "simple patent family" definition but narrower than the "extended patent family" definition, is to consider that "[a]ll the documents having at least one common priority belong to the same patent family."[3]

In general, "[p]atent families are [effectively] defined by databases, not by national or international laws, and family members for a particular invention can vary from database to database."[6]

Usage

Scholars have exploited patent family information in a variety of ways. One notable use involves identifying "twin" patents, namely patent applications covering the same invention across multiple jurisdictions. In the same way that biology or psychology scholars use data on twins to perform twin studies, intellectual property scholars use data on patent twins to study the functioning of the patent system. For instance, twin studies have allowed researchers to compare quality across patent offices[7] or to observe what appears to be a national preference in patent prosecution, in apparent violation of the national treatment principle (although the reasons for the observed effect are unclear).[8][9] Another notable use of patent families is to impute missing data in patent databases.[10][11]

See also

References
  1. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Economic Analysis and Statistics Division, OECD science, technology and industry scoreboard: towards a knowledge-based economy, OECD Publishing, 2001, ISBN 92-64-18648-4, ISBN 978-92-64-18648-4, page 60.
  2. United States Patent and Trademark Office web site, Glossary Archived 2009-04-30 at the Wayback Machine. Consulted on April 27, 2009.
  3. "Beyond patent families – an updated perspective" (PDF). Patent Information News. European Patent Office (1): 4–5. March 2014. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  4. "Patent families > Definitions". European Patent Office. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  5. "Patent families > The "extended" (INPADOC) patent family". European Patent Office. Retrieved October 17, 2012.
  6. Simmons, E S (2009). ""Black Sheep" in the patent family". World Patent Information (31): 11–18. cited in "Beyond patent families – an updated perspective" (PDF). Patent Information News. European Patent Office (1): 4–5. March 2014. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  7. de Rassenfosse, Gaetan; Griffiths, William; Jaffe, Adam; Webster, Elizabeth, "Low-Quality Patents in the Eye of the Beholder: Evidence from Multiple Examiners", Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization
  8. Webster, Elizabeth; Jensen, Paul; Palangkaraya, Alfons, "Patent examination outcomes and the national treatment principle", RAND Journal of Economics, 45 (2), pp. 449–469
  9. de Rassenfosse, Gaetan; Hosseini, Reza (2020), "Discrimination against foreigners in the U.S. patent system", Journal of International Business Policy
  10. de Rassenfosse, Gaetan; Dernis, Helene; Guellec, Dominique; Picci, Lucio; van Pottelsberghe, Bruno, "The worldwide count of priority patents: A new indicator of inventive activity", Research Policy, 42 (3), pp. 720–737
  11. de Rassenfosse, Gaetan; Seliger, Florian, "Imputation of missing information in worldwide patent data", Data in Brief, 34


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