French granted patents

Many experienced patent searchers routinely use the Esp@cenet® database to get hold of patent specifications. Some might also use the DEPATISnet database, which is good for German documents and sometimes supplements Espacenet (American design patents, for example).

Such users normally use the European interface or their own national version, with the search mask available in a number of languages. It might have been thought that the different versions simply reflected languages, but there can be differences in the content.

Robin Le Goff, a French ingénieur brevets ("patent engineer"), has alerted me to the fact that the French national version of Esp@cenet® contains PDF documents of some 235,000 French granted patents. These are the second stage, B documents as opposed to the initial A documents. Anyone using another version of the database would simply get the corresponding A documents (with the same specification number).

These granted patents seem to go back to the early 1990s. Judging from the patent office web site, they went up in October. It would be helpful if this new (and welcome) content was available on all the versions of the database.