DEPATISnet

DEPATISnet offers you the opportunity to carry out searches in the DPMA's electronic document archive online and free of charge. It includes more than 160 million patent publications from around the world. DEPATISnet is particularly suited to state-of-the-art and freedom-to-operate searches.

Patent documents can be searched using various bibliographic details, such as title, applicant or inventor. In German (DE, DD), European (EP), American (US) and WIPO (WO) documents published in German, English or French, you can even perform a full-text search across the entire document.

English translations are available for Chinese, Japanese and Korean patent specifications. This makes searching considerably easier and faster. Full-text searches can be carried out within the translated text. The translations are produced using WIPO Translate, an AI-powered machine translation tool. Please note that these do not meet the quality standards of a professional translation and may contain errors. No liability is accepted.

There are five different search types available to you:

• Smart: You can enter publication numbers, owner and inventor names and search terms in the search field in the header area.
• Basic: Select the Basic mode if you are a newcomer or have little searching experience. It has an easy-to-use intuitive search interface.
• Advanced: The Advanced search allows you to search in different search fields and to combine the selected fields according to your needs.
• Expert: The Expert mode is recommended for users experienced in patent searches. This mode allows to create more complex search queries.
• Ikofax: The IKOFAX mode is suitable for users proficient in the fields of IKOFAX syntax and the DEPATIS database system.

The help section of DEPATISnet provides you with detailed information and explanations on the use of the various search options, the available documents and the latest database updates.

• The service disposes of both German and English user interfaces
• Via DEPATISnet you can also search in the International Patent Classification (IPC) and the corresponding catchword index

There are various options available for viewing the bibliographical data and documents found by your search of relevant documents in DEPATISnet.

• Configurable result lists allow you to display not only bibliographical data available, but also the original document in PDF format.
• You can browse through individual pages of a document or jump directly to certain parts of the document ("subdocuments").
• The documents can be printed on a page-by-page basis or in full.
• The result lists can be exported in various formats for further processing afterwards.
• The claims of German patents and utility models can be displayed in a tree view. This option is available via the bibliographic data in the context menu. If there are no dependencies or if the number of claims is too high, the tree view cannot be displayed effectively.
• DEPATISnet is provided by the DPMA free of charge. Data on the latest German documents are available on the respective official publication day (generally on a Thursday).