Good day, I wish to be able to access an up-to-date list ( place, book, website, document etc. ) of all patents that have not expired.
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Probably not possible.– Eric S ♦Jul 9, 2019 at 5:18
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this was also asked on law.– George White ♦Jul 10, 2019 at 6:34
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what is the level of accuracy needed? Does this list need to be 100% accurate, or would approximately accurate do?– PatentlyJul 10, 2019 at 18:17
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2You will get more useful answers if you edit the question to indicate your ultimate aim or at least a goal closer to it.– George White ♦Jul 10, 2019 at 23:08
2 Answers
This is a copy of the answer I posted to the same question on law.
Thousands of patents are granted every week. On July 2, 2019 the number was 8,034. Of course there are many patent offices around the world also issuing patents. There are many databases for searching patents including USPTO patent search, google patents, Espacenet, The LENs and PatentScope.
Unfortunately there is not an easy way to search for patents that are not yet expired. Patents generally expire 20 years from the effective application filing. There are 4,452,128 issued U.S. patents with application dates after July 1999. However some of them had days of term adjustment added to the 20 years and many more expired due to non-payment of maintenance fees.
You aren't going to find exactly what you're looking for most likely; however, you can get approximately what you want by using Google Patents. You will of course need to understand a few things like the nations you're looking at and the basic patent rules that govern those nations to get to your approximate answer. Here's something to get you started:
You will need to look at:
- status = granted
- priority date <= (term of grant depending on the nationality, which varies by country)
- exclude the patents that have been abandoned (a lot get abandoned)
What remains should be close to what you are looking for. This likely isn't a 100% complete list, but it will get you 95% there.
Other options are you can search the individual databases of the patent organizations (example: USPTO, EPO, etc.) They should be able to provide you with more detailed info on the current status of individual patents.
If this is purely for academic purposes--just for aggregating numbers, you might use a throw-away keyword like "the" (which virtually every patent will contain). If you want a dump of the results of these databases, you might try asking them nicely. :)
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Google patents regularly returns fewer than all patents meeting a search criteria. I find The Lens much more reliable.– Eric S ♦Jul 9, 2019 at 16:45
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I do not think google patents has a search field for expiration– George White ♦Jul 10, 2019 at 6:33
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@GeorgeWhite You are correct, you will need to manually determine the length of the time using the priority-date, or (as I recommended earlier by searching the raw databases at the offices themselves). -- This really depends on the level of accuracy you need. Google Patents isn't entirely accurate (but it is fairly good for approximations). If you need accuracy then you need to go to the offices themselves or get access to a comprehensive database. -- Accuracy was not specified in the question.– PatentlyJul 10, 2019 at 18:06
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More to the point, I do not think any of them will give you a way to sort out patents that have expired due to non-payment of renewal or maintenance fees.– George White ♦Jul 10, 2019 at 21:18