Wednesday, August 12, 2009

US Assignment Data in espacenet

The June issue of Patent Information News states that the EPO is in the process of reloading US assignment records into its legal status database. When the project is finished US patents in esp@cenet will be linked to more than six million assignments dating back to 1981. Assignment data has been available for some US docs in esp@cenet, but much of the data was corrupted by technical problems. I assume that this includes all the data available on the USPTO's web assignment database and Cassis ASSIGN, although both give a slightly earlier start date of August 1980.