Saturday, May 16, 2009

INPADOC reports using Japanese document numbers

I just discovered that downloading an INPADOC Legal Status report using Patent Grabber requires that the Japanese document number be the publication number of the "laid open" patent application. Using the granted patent number will likely turn up the wrong invention since the Japanese Patent Office can use the same number for totally different inventions.

If you find that doing an INPADOC query using a Japanese number results in a report for a totally unrelated invention, then it is likely that the number you are using is a granted patent number. If you search at Espacenet using that number, you will get several hits. One of them will be the invention that you are looking for, and you can get the Japanese laid open publication number from that hit.