A patent office is a governmental or intergovernmental organisation which controls the issue of patents. A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive and...

List of patent offices

• Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO)
• European Patent Office (EPO) [1]
• German Patent Office (DPMA)
• IP Australia
• Japanese Patent Office (JPO) [2]
• State Intellectual Property Office of China
• United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) [3]
• United Kingdom Patent Office

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) is the patent, trade-mark, and copyright administration body of Canada. ... The European Patent Organisation (EPO or EPOrg in order to distinguish it from the European Patent Office, which is the main organ of the organisation) is a public international organisation set up by the European Patent Convention. ... The Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt (DPMA) or German Patent and Trade Mark Office (GPTO) is the German national patent office, with headquarters at Munich. ... The United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or USPTO) is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that provides patent and trademark protection to inventors and businesses for their inventions and corporate and product identification. ... The United Kingdom Patent Office is the government agency responsible for maintaining registers of intellectual property including copyright, designs, patents and trade marks in the United Kingdom. ...

List of past patent offices or the like

• Confederate Patent Office
• Goskomizobretenie (Soviet patent office)
• International Patent Institute

The Confederate Patent Office was the agency of the Confederate States of America charged with issuing patents on inventions. ... Goskomizobretenie (Russian: Госкомизобретений), which stood for Gosudarstvennyi komitet po delam izobretenie i otkrytii, was the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries in the former Soviet Union. ... The International Patent Institute (or IIB standing for Institut International des Brevets, its French name) was an intellectual property organisation established on June 6, 1947 in The Hague, Netherlands, by a set of European countries, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. ...

See also

• Patent clerk
• Patent attorney
• Intellectual property organisation
• Trilateral Offices

A patent clerk or patent examiner is an employee, usually a civil servant, working within a patent office and whose work is to examine patent applications as to whether they deserve a patent. ... A patent attorney is an attorney who has the specialized qualifications necessary for representing clients in obtaining patents and acting in all matters and procedures relating to patent law and practice, such as filing an opposition. ... Intellectual property organizations are international intergovernmental organizations that involve cooperation in the area of copyrights, trademarks and patents. ... The so-called Trilateral Offices, or Trilateral Patent Offices, are a group of patent offices consisting of the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). ...

External links

• Compilation of intellectual property links (e.g. patent offices, courts, databases, legal texts, etc.