The roots of patent information in Ilmenau and thus of PATON go back to 1895, the year in which Ilmenau's Technikum - today's Technical University - was founded. The patent information office was part of a network that consisted of around 100 offices during the Weimar Republic. Complete patent sheets and individual patent specifications from this period have been preserved.
Patents on glass furnaces with cooling chambers, on processes for the manufacture of vacuum flasks and the like, granted under the patent laws of 1877 and 1891, are evidence of the Ilmenau patent issuing office's commitment to Thuringian industry.
National Socialism drove many German scientists and technicians out of their homeland. The war isolated Germany from the foreign state of the art. Many of the remaining inventors worked in the armaments industry and were therefore secretly active. Regional patent information also lost its meaning in Ilmenau.
Eight years after the end of the war, Ilmenau's tradition in the field of patent information was revived with the founding of the Technical University, when the founding rector, Prof. Hans Stamm, set up a patent information desk.
The integration of the patent information office into the "Institute for Information Science, Invention and Law" (INER) emphasized the interaction between patent information and patent law and at the same time the symbiosis of teaching, research and practice that has been maintained to this day. Even at this time, every student at the TH received training in the field of technical and patent information as well as patent law and was able to obtain a degree or doctorate in this field. The research results obtained were in turn incorporated into the teaching and the services offered by the information center.
In November 1962, the predecessor institute of PATON organized the first "Colloquium of the Ilmenau University of Technology on Patent Information", called the "Oberhof Colloquium", with the title "Colloquium on Documentation for Industry", the forerunner of today's PATINFO. From 30-40 participants at the time, the event has grown tenfold and is now the largest event on patent and trade mark information in Europe. We provide a complete chronology of this now over 50-year development on CD At the beginning of the 1980s, the Machine Search Department of the "Polytechnic Patent Library of Ilmenau Technical University" developed software solutions on the basis of continuously accumulated INPADOC data. A cooperation agreement with the European Patent Office in the mid-1980s made it possible to set up a patent database under the name "Extended Patent Family Service (EPD)" with 10 million documents from all over the world at that time. This database served a so-called automated patent pre-research system, whose component "SIV - Selective Information Dissemination" served to continuously supply East German industry and university institutions with thematically selected patent data, whereby the results of approx. 500 profiles were generated and sent out every month. This reflects the active patent work in the companies and research institutions of the GDR. The TH Ilmenau expected a patent application to be submitted for every dissertation.
During this time, the institute was already researching a machine indexing procedure (MAI) and developing the basis for patent statistical analysis methods, which had a significant impact on the level of patent information in East Germany. The GDR Patent Office and the Carl Zeiss Jena combine adopted the Ilmenau software solutions.
The Ilmenau model of the Polytechnic Patent Library had a lasting influence on the development of other East German patent information centers.
The dissolution of the GDR Patent Office and the restructuring of the East German patent information system in 1990 changed the profile of the Polytechnic Patent Library in the direction of increased use of worldwide information services, while the development of its own databases was initially postponed. The name change to PATON | Patent Information Center and Online Services reflected this change.
The INER Institute split into two areas - the Department of Information Science joined the Faculty of Economics, while the Ilmenau University of Technology transferred intellectual property protection to the central PATON institution. The German Patent Office recognized PATON as the official patent information center of the state of Thuringia. In 1990, the first joint meeting of patent information centers from East and West Germany took place here.
With the increase in technical possibilities after reunification, PATON systematically increased its efficiency as an information, search and training center for electronic technical and patent information: A powerful CD-ROM jukebox network with databases of IP rights, technical literature and companies replaced the manual two-stage index card microfiche search system in the search room. The Online Services department concluded user contracts with the hosts STN, Datastar, FIZ Technik and GBI. The state of Thuringia continues to support searches for Thuringian university institutions to this day. In 1990, PATON also entered into a contract with FIZ Karlsruhe to set up a training center for electronic specialist and patent information. In 1996, PATON was awarded the contract as an official INSTI partner, a federally funded project that supports SMEs in securing and marketing R&D results and continues to exist today as the WIPANO project.
In 1999, PATON became the official patent issuing office of the DPMA and was entrusted with the task of accepting IP rights on its behalf. In the same year, PATON launched the groundbreaking PATONline service, which it had developed itself. The basis for this is an in-house data pool with over 43 million full texts. This was the first time in the world that IP rights were automatically made available to anyone online via the Internet in a matter of seconds.
The patent exploitation agency has been the fourth team at PATON since 2002. This team advises the scientific institutions of the state of Thuringia on all matters relating to industrial property rights and supports these institutions in the protection and exploitation of research results. The final link in the service chain has thus been completed. PATON's philosophy was and is to provide companies and inventors with expert support in all processes of industrial property protection from the idea to exploitation "from a single source". PATON now represents one of the most distinguished and leading patent information centers in Germany.
PATON processes approx. 1,500 commissioned searches per year and supervises approx. 1,000 of its own searches in the search room. In addition, we inform approx. 2000 students, course participants or individuals on intellectual property topics.
Among the German Länder in the east, Thuringia has been the most active patent applicant at the DPMA for many years (calculated per 100,000 inhabitants). PATON considers it its duty to continue to make an active contribution to this in the future.