Standard patent classification map
Introduction of Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC)
Composition of the CPC
The CPC consists of 260,000 entries and is a subdivision/extension of the IPC, an international patent classification. Visit the USPTO site on CPC.
Advantages of CPCs
Standard
CPC is an international standard and is used by the intellectual property offices of most developed countries.
Includes the latest technologies
CPC includes advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, etc. within its framework. As technology changes, new codes are being added to the CPC system or branched out and integrated. As a result, each nation's intellectual property office notifies the public of newly emerging CPCs. In addition, to help you identify patents that have changed their patent classification, we provide a 'patent vs. current classification' mapping data.
CPCs granted to past patents
Each nation's intellectual property office has granted CPCs to past patents. Therefore, you can search for past patents of each nation through CPC.
CPC for each patent
Each nation's intellectual property office mandatorily assigns one main classification CPC to each patent, and optionally assigns one or more sub classification CPCs. Typically, there are at least three to five CPCs per patent.
(Note)CPC related resources
PatentPia's patent classification data handling process
Using CPCs in PatentPia
Searching for CPCs
When you enter a search term in the search bar of PatentPia GoldenCompass, it will display search results targeting CPC titles. If you click on a specific CPC title in the search results, you will be taken to the CPC analysis contents.
Note: For readability of CPC codes, PatentPia recommends that you,
i) Provides a hierarchy: If you click on the '....' mark, you can see the upper tier CPCs and titles of a particular CPC, and understand the context of the CPC.
ii) Displaying the title as 'parent title + own title': The title of a specific CPC is displayed by combining the CPC title inherited from the upper CPC to help you understand the content of a specific CPC.
iii) Abbreviated and representative expressions: Displaying titles by abbreviating or representing them, removing examples, related classifications, etc. in the actual CPC title to improve the readability of the title.
CPC-specific analysis contents
PatentPia provides analysis contents by CPC. Below is Example of analysis contents for Augmented Reality (AR; AR glass).
Using CPC in technology categories
The majority of the terminal nodes that make up PatentPia's 100,000+ technology categories are composed using CPC. By using CPC, PatentPia technology categories systematically avoid missing and noisy patents that correspond to the category.
As an example, we can see that the technology category of Wind motors has all of its lower members composed of CPCs.
Using CPCs in Patent Search
In PatentPia Search, you can search for patents, events, etc. using CPCs as search criteria.
When entering a CPC as a search term, if you enter a CPC code in the Main CPC field, only patents containing the entered CPC in the main patent classification will be searched. If you enter the CPC code in All CPC, patents with the CPC entered in the sub patent classification will also be searched.
On the other hand, if you select 'Search with sub-patent classifications', not only the CPC entered as the search criteria will be searched, but also patents containing all the lower CPCs of that CPC in the CPC hierarchy will be searched. In general, it makes sense to select 'Search with lower patent classifications'.
