European Patent Office (EPO): all European patents available on-line thanks to the application conceived and built by Jouve for the EPO

For more than 30 years, the European Patent Office (EPO) continually optimises the quality and diffusion of its patent publications. The EPO has recently been taken a major step with Jouve: the complete digitisation of its publications. Now, the EPO no longer prints the patents, but publishes them electronically. This process allows a reduction in costs and the improvement of the quality of the accessibility of the information, whilst respecting the legal validity of the publication: availability at a given date and time of the information. It should, of course, guarantee the necessary security for a reliable, high-availability hosting service to its world audience.

A well-known service provider for industrial property

Involved for many years in the capture, typesetting and circulation of information on patents, Jouve perfectly masters the data formats and necessary technologies. Thus, Jouve was able to diffuse the patent data for the EPO on CD-ROM (Space products) and on the internet (“Publication Server” application and “Mimosa On-Line”) from the same data source. In fact, its hosting centre respects strong constraints in availability, security and sufficiency demanded by the legal data, strategic for companies monitoring technological innovations.

A successful digitisation, improving company service

Using all its experience, Jouve has ensured:

• The design and development of the “Publication Server” application
• The installation of the hardware and software on the numerous servers dedicated to hosting in our Mayenne centre
• The installation of a secure access using HTTPS
• The conversion of the input data
• The management of a 24/24 operational hosting service based on redundant components of the entire system

Now, every Wednesday at precisely 14:00, the EPO diffuses the requests for patents and the European patents delivered on the Internet which have the same legal validity as the paper versions. Freely available for all actors concerned by industrial property rights, more than 1,200 patents are thus available on-line each week, and about 3.2 million patents are presently consultable and downloadable in XML, SGML or PDF.

Click here to discover the “Publication Server” application of the EPO