Tag Archives: International Patent Classification (IPC) system

European Patent Office (EPO) explains how to patent nano

A Jan. 28, 2014 news item on Nanowerk describes the European Patent Office’s brochure on patenting nanotechnology-derived applications (Note: A link has been removed),

The number of European applications filed for nanotechnology-related inventions has more than tripled since the mid-1990s.

The interdisciplinary nature of nanotechnology poses a challenge for patent offices, legal representatives, inventors and applicants alike.

A new brochure (Nanotechnology and patents; pdf) from the European Patent Office (EPO) explains how to get started if you want to search for nanotechnology inventions in patent databases, and what to look out for if you are thinking about applying to the EPO for a nanotechnology patent yourself.

The EPO’s 16 pp. Nanotechnology and Patents brochure (PDF) can be found here.  The EPO website is here and they do have a webpage dedicated to nanotechnology,

Nanotechnology – entities with a controlled geometrical size of at least one functional component below 100 nanometres in one or more dimensions susceptible of making physical, chemical or biological effects – is considered by many to be one of the key technologies of this century, with an expected market volume of EUR 1 trillion in 2015.

Nanotechnology can occur in almost any area of science and engineering: it is just as relevant to biotechnologists and physicists as it is to electrical and mechanical engineers or materials scientists. The interdisciplinary nature of the field means that anyone interested in literature on nanotechnology, especially existing patent documents, struggles to retrieve it from the databases available.

To get to grips with this new technology, the EPO introduced the “Y01N” tags to label nanotechnology.

Y01N became B82Y

Recently all patent offices worldwide started to classify nanotechnology uniformly under the International Patent Classification (IPC) system. To make this possible, a new symbol, B82Y was introduced into the IPC on 1 January 2011, building on the Y01N system that the EPO had been using to tag nanotechnology-related patent applications.

The new B82Y symbol makes it easier to retrieve relevant patent documents in this important technical area as it is now part of both the IPC and the CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification) schemes. The EPO has moved all nanotechnology documents from the Y01N area in its databases to B82Y. The Y01N codes have been discontinued.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find a publication date for the brochure. Hopefully this was produced relatively recently. One final comment, you can go here to download the PDF or order a print copy (English only) from the one of the EPO’s publication pages.