Patent Status Indicators in CA/CAplus

Patent Status Indicators (STI) for patents and utility models now appear in the PSPI table in CA/CAplus records. This information is critical for Freedom to Operate searches and for strategic business decisions, including patent acquisition and licensing and for competitive purposes. Status Indicator data is updated several times a week.

CA/CAplus offers Patent Status Indicator coverage for most current patent authorities in CAplus. Patent Status Indicators are irrelevant for two technical disclosure publications that CA/Caplus covers as patent authorities, Research Disclosure (through 2006) and ip.com. Details of authorities covered and coverage years is available at: https://www.cas.org/support/documentation/references/patyear.

Patent Status Indicators are calculated and provided by FIZ Karlsruhe based on over 4.1K legal status codes from INPADOCDB, as well as corresponding gazette data and/or calculated expiration dates.

The calculated STI will identify whether a patent is ALIVE, DEAD, TRANSITIONAL or INDETERMINATE. The Patent Status Established Date (STED) provides the date on which the status was initially calculated, or last changed. Initially at launch, the STED dates will reflect recent timeframes for initial calculation but going forward the dates will more closely align with real time legal events, gazette updates or expiration calculation updates.

A patent depicted in the PSPI table will have only one of these STI values at any given time. The possible STI values are defined as follows:

• ALIVE means that the application is still under active prosecution, or that the granted patent is in force.
• DEAD means that the application is no longer being pursued, or that the rights granted to the IP holder are no longer in force, due to expiry, withdrawal by the IP rights holder, permanent cancellation due to non-payment of fees past any deadlines, etc. The DEAD Patent Status Indicator is assigned only when there is no chance that the patent is still ALIVE.

           - Patents which have no source INPADOC legal status data will be deemed ALIVE unless they have reached their calculated
             expiration date based on the application date.

           - Patents can exist with no status due to either differences in coverage by FIZ or the data has yet to be integrated to CAplus for
             recently ingested patents.

• TRANSITIONAL refers to the period when the latest legal status event (such as a withdrawal or a lapse due to non-payment of fees) indicates that the patent may be on its way to becoming DEAD. If the patent is neither reinstated after a withdrawal, or the renewal fees not paid, then the patent will become DEAD six months after the initial legal event date. An event such as payment of renewal fees would return a TRANSITIONAL status to ALIVE.

• INDETERMINATE is specific to EP grants. EP grants will be INDETERMINATE until the calculated expiration date. Because there can be a large volume of legal status events involving EP grants, some of which are reflected in or duplicated by the national offices and others which are not, it is difficult to provide a meaningful Patent Status for the EP grant as a whole. It may instead be worthwhile to check the national registers of countries of interest.

To support Patent Status Indicator searching, new Search and Display fields are available.

• Restrict your search to just those patents with STI information by using STI/FA.
• Search in /STI (alias /PSPI) for the Patent Status Indicators ALIVE, DEAD, TRANSITIONAL or INDETERMINATE. You can also search by their single letter abbreviations.
• For just the Patent Status Indicator of the basic patent, search using the /STI.B field qualifier (alias /PSPI.B).
• Search the Patent Status Established Date (/STED) in YYYYMMDD format, or search the Patent Status Established Year (/STEY) in YYYY format.
• The PSPI table is automatically included in predefined displays such as BIB, ALL and MAX, but can also be custom displayed using D PSPI (alias D STI) or D PSPI.B (displays the STI information for only the basic patent). Note that FBIB and MAX/IMAX displays include the PSPI table for the first patent family documented within the record.

Alerts tracking Patent Status Indicator changes can be set up, using the STUP update option. For example, you may wish to set up an Alert to track Canadian patents whose Patent Status Indicator became DEAD in the most recent week.