Overview

When an EP is granted, the applicant has generally three months to decide in which EP states it is to be protected.  Once this is done and the fees have been paid to those member states, these are classified as validated states and, if subsequently, the applicant decides to cease annuity payments to a validated state, then these are abandoned states.  The states which were originally listed on the grant but were not validated are lapsed.  

On a competitive awareness level, this is important to see where a company is protecting their patents as well as giving you an insight to their IP protection strategy, for example with a freedom-to-operate search.  This is of course important for your own organization to help decide where to protect your inventions and to confirm in which EP states your IP rights are protected.

Using a combination of the EPO Register and Legal Events data, we have significantly enhanced the EP state data, where you can now:

• Quickly ascertain the validated EP states as well as their active/inactive status
• View the EP state details in the Legal Status tab
• Perform detailed search and analysis
• Export the content  13 fields available

The EP validated state information can be found in the document details view.  The validated states are found next to the publication number tombstone data, and the details in the Legal tab in Validation Data.