Applicant
An applicant is a person or organisation (e.g. company, university, etc.) who/which has filed a patent application. There may be more than one applicant per application. The applicant may also be the inventor , although this is not necessarily the case.
The applicant format for a person consists of the surname followed by the first name (e.g. Smith John) and should be entered within quotation marks.
The applicant format for an organisation is made up of all the words comprising the name of that organisation (e.g. British Aerospace) and should be entered within quotation marks.
You can also use the NOT operator to exclude words from your search query. However, NOT cannot be placed at the beginning of a search field, only after a search term.
If you do not know whether the person is the applicant or the inventor, use the Smart search function.
You cannot use apostrophes ('), hyphens (-) or slashes (/). Use blank spaces instead. Diacritical characters (umlauts and accents) are not allowed.
For example, we recommend that you search for Julich or Juelich in order to retrieve all spellings (Jülich/Juelich/Julich).
In the case of documents published in other alphabets (Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese, etc.), the name of the applicant is not searchable.
A patent may have been sold to another company. The European Patent Register shows the name of the current patent-holder. You can view former applicants by clicking on the "Show history" button on the "About this file" screen.
Information which is no longer current is shown in grey italics.