“Can I tell how many times a company (as a patent proprietor) has been opposed in EPO Opposition proceedings?”

This was the question that ipcopykaya and I considered late last Friday. Although the use of Google Patents was suggested we wondered whether the European Patent Register would provide us with the capability to search a particular Applicant and filter the results by opposed cases.

The EP Patents Register Advanced Search Menu is shown below. As indicated in the figure, it is possible to search for instances of a particular individual or company as Opponent.

Taking the example of Dyson Technology Limited, we can see that if we plug Dyson into the Opponent field we get a set of 11 search results where Dyson has opposed someone.

But what of the alternative? Is it possible to tell how many times Dyson has been opposed?

Cue 25 minutes of stumbling around in the dark until ipcopykaya announced that he’d cracked it before somewhat sheepishly confessing that he had had to “read the damned manual”.

The solution

Located a couple of clicks away from the Advanced Menu interface was this explanation of the Opponent field: adding “01” into the Opponent field while searching against a specific Applicant would yield the result we wanted.

Returning to our example of Dyson again, the following search query shows how many times Dyson has been on the receiving end of an Opposition.

And the results of the query

Let us know if this search query has worked for you or if you’ve encountered any issues. Feel free to leave any other tips in the comments section below.

Mark Richardson 28 May 2014

xkcd on the benefits of reading the damn manual