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Earlier this year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office announced the publication of an advanced version of the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) scheme to be officially launched on January 1, 2013.
The CPC is a detailed classification system based on the International Patent Classification (IPC) administered by WIPO and includes approximately 250,000 classification symbols.
The new system, aimed at developing a common classification for technical documents and in particular patent publications, would be used by both offices in the patent granting process.
The best classification practices incorporated in CPC should enhance prior art searches and facilitate work-sharing initiatives designed to reduce unnecessary work duplication between patent offices.
For more details, please visit the official CPC website http://cpcinfo.org/
The classification search in Espacenet includes now the CPC. For people familiar with using the ECLA search capability in Espacenet, the CPC browser will be easy to use. In the old browser, there were two input boxes, one to enter classification symbols in order to view the corresponding part of the ECLA scheme, and one to enter free text in order to retrieve potentially relevant classification symbols through statistical analysis. In the new CPC browser, these two input boxes have been merged into a single one.