Tour of European Patent Offices - Greece

The SPC Blog continues its tour of European patent office websites and this time, it's Greece.

The colourful Greek Patent Office website is accessible here for the original site and here for the English language site- and you may have time to grab a cup of coffee before it finally comes onto your screen.

You can search the patent register here for patents and SPCs active substances. If the patent you're looking at has a corresponding SPC application or granted SPC, you should be able to click your way to the corresponding SPC site.

Tour of Patent Offices - Germany

For the first posting in 2009, the SPC blog decided it was time to check out the scene in Germany.

Information about patent applications, patents, including status can be obtained from the register website of the German Patent Office (here, https://dpinfo.dpma.de/). Although there is an English language search mask, the results are posted in German. You can however click to a table containing a translation of the terms listed in the search results. The site may be rather slow during peak usage times and refuse to run your search.

The site does provide information on whether an SPC application was filed, but unfortunately, no information on the status of the SPCs can be obtained.

For those interested in reading up on German SPC case law, the website of the German Patent and Trade Mark Court is your place to look (that is, if you want it for free). You can search cases from 2003 onwards by date, case number and term. But a word of warning, you'll have to brush up your German because there isn't an English language site. If the case has gone up to the Federal Supreme Court, you can check out the pages of the Bundesgerichtshof for cases back to 2000. Here again, the site's in German.

Hopefully, short summaries of future cases will be published here in English, for those that don't have a grasp of the lovely language of Goethe.

Tour of Patent Offices: Bulgaria

This week, it's off to Bulgaria, thanks to the kind information from Ventsi Stoilov, a Bulgarian IP specialist.

The Bulgarian Patent Office (BPO) website can be accessed here and searches on their database can be done on the BPO On-line website here. However, the database appears to be limited to trademarks, industrial design and case law - unfortunately not much help to those interested in patents. While researching this I noticed I was visitor no. 201,070 to the site. By the time I had done 3 searches, I was visitor no. 201,073...