International Patent Classifications in Patentsview Data

Here we request two utility patent, 3930726 and 5726061, so we can see how their IPC (International Patent Classifications) fields come back from the patentsview api. We request a bunch of the api's ipc related fields in the f parameter.

This page is sending in a get request to the /patents endpoint with the following parameters:
q={"patent_number":["5726061","3930726"]}
&f=["patent_number","ipc_class","ipc_section","ipc_sequence","ipc_subclass","ipc_subgroup","ipc_main_group"]

Compare what is turned below by the patentsview api with what is in the uspto's ppubs for these two patents (listed as Current International Class). A patent's IPC assignments can change over time. The patentsview api has the assignment(s) that were present when the patent was issued while the uspto's ppubs displays their current assignment(s). Or put another way, IPC searches using the uspto's ppubs reflect current assignments while IPC searches in patentsview reflect their at-issue state. As far as I know there is no bulk source of current IPC assignment so the patentsview api cannot return current IPC assignments, all they have is the at-issue assignments found in the underlying bulk xml grant files. The classifications themselves change annually so searching at-issue assignments would only be relevant in a historical context (which is what this site is all about!). This aslo means that all of the patents in the patentsview database are not classified under the same IPC schema so you'd have to be careful drawing any kind of conclusions. See https://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/

• 3930726 in ppubs
• 5726061 in ppubs