The answer to Claudia's question:
Patent families prior to the mid 1960's are essentially impossible to assign
as we do today. That is because until the mid 1960's, the patent offices did
not include foreign priority data on the front page of patents. In older US
patents, the first page would say something like "This patent claims German
priority from May 2, 1957", but they would not publish the application
number, so a link to another patent was impossible to assign. I don't think
the CA concordance even came out until the patent offices started putting
priority data on patents. There was an index of patents in CA, going back to
the 20' or 30's (again I recall this as the subject of a thread on this
list), but it wasn't a concordance. EDOC also has no family linkages
available from the time frame you are interested in. Even CA only indexed
patents from nationals of the issuing country until fairly recently, so you
also can't look for the same inventors and same subject in the old indices,
although I think CA did in fact include a lot of equivalents from the US and
GB patent offices, with foreign inventorship.
If you just want a US equivalent for a German patent, you should look in
databases covering older US patents, like corporate patents or IFIPAT. Thats
about the closest your are going to get.
Andy Berks
Merck & Co.
Rahway, NJ
> ----------
> From: Bill Murray[SMTP:billmurray2@hotmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 11, 1999 12:42 AM
> To: piug-l@derwent.tecc.co.uk
> Subject: patent equiv. for older patents (1954)
>
> Non-member submission from [claudia.chandler@kvaerner.com]
>
> Is there any way of finding patent family information for a foreign
> chemical patent from 1954 ? Specifically DE00913889 (6/1998). There
> does not appear to be any commercial database that would cover this
> information.
>
> Claudia Chandler
> Kvaerner Chemetics Inc
> 1818 Cornwall Avenue
> Vancouver, B.C.
> V6J 1C7
> phone 604-737-4510 fax 604-734-0340
> claudia.chandler@kvaerner.com
>
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