Patent statistics (B2, B3 documents)

The IT team behind our validation platform (passport.pintz.com) has recently checked a huge amount of EPO patent data in order to improve our service, and they found some very interesting statistics that I decided to share. (Or maybe only interesting for nerds like me 😜)

Yearly, there are about 1300 B2 and 30 B3 documents published by the EPO. This means that about 1300 patents are maintained as amended after opposition and only about 30 patents enter limitation proceedings in a year.

Comparing these numbers to the yearly sum, we can see that from all the published patent documents in a year (about 140.000), about 0.9% are B2 and only 0.02% (!) are B3 patent documents.

By the way, there are 5 types of B documents:

B1 = European patent specification (granted patent)

B2 = New European patent specification (amended specification)

B3 = European patent specification (after limitation procedure) 

B8 = Corrected title page of a B document, ie. B1 or B2 document

B9 = Complete reprint of a B document, ie. B1 or B2 document

(The yearly numbers are from 2019.)