01 Who grants these titles?

The legal protection that is granted by these titles is given by the SPTO (Spanish Patent and Trademark Office), an autonomous body of the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism. Through this protection and by distributing the information contained in the titles, it supports and drives technological and economic development.

02 How is Industrial Property protected?

To protect industrial inventions, the SPTO grants patents, utility models, complementary protection certificates and topographies of semiconductor products.

Patents protect a new procedure, a new device, a new product or an improvement or enhancement of the same. How long does this protection last? 20 years as from the application filing date, and annual fees must be paid to keep it in force.

Utility models are titles whereby the SPTO protects inventions of a lower rank, which consist of devices, instruments, tools, etc. with a certain configuration from which some use or practical advantage is derived. Its maximum duration is 10 years as from the application, as long as the corresponding fees are paid every year.

Complementary protection certificates are granted to extend patents, for a maximum of five years, pertaining to medicines or plant protection products in order to compensate the period during which they could not be marketed as a result of being subject to prior administrative authorisation.

Integrated circuits and the layouts, three-dimensional dispositions, routing and interconnections thereof are protected by topographies of semiconductor products; their maximum duration is 10 years as from the end of the year when they are used for the first time or they are registered.

To protect distinctive signs, trademarks and trade names are granted.

Trademarks grant the exclusive right to use a sign to identify a product or service in the market. Words or combinations of words, images, figures, symbols, graphics, letters, figures, three-dimensional shapes (wrappings, packages, etc.) and even sounds - as long as they can be graphically represented - can be trademarks.

A trade name is a title that grants the exclusive right to use any sign or name as the identifier of a company in the course of trade; as an Industrial Property title, it is independent from the names of companies recorded in Companies Registries. The protection of distinctive signs lasts 10 years, and it can be renewed indefinitely for periods of equal duration.

Shape creations are protected by industrial designs, which grant the exclusive right over the appearance of all or part of a product, deriving from the characteristics of the lines, contours, shape, etc. of the product or the decoration thereof. It lasts five years as from the time it is applied for, and it can be renewed for periods of five years, up to a maximum of twenty-five years as from that date.

03 What is Technological Information?

The SPTO has a volume of technological and commercial information in Spain that has unique content, given that it includes all the documents of patents, utility models, industrial models and drawings, industrial designs, trade marks and other distinctive signs.

This is the information that the SPTO has accumulated throughout its years of registration activity and which is made available to all interested parties through a series of Technological Information Services. The other function of the SPTO is to distribute this information in order to drive and support technological development and economic growth.

What purposes or needs can the Technological Information Services satisfy?

• Knowing the legal status of any file

• Determining the state of the art of a specific technical sector

• Monitoring the competitive environment in technological and commercial development activities

• Making it possible to monitor technological evolution

• Identifying trade marks and signs used in the market and assessing the possibility of obtaining new signs

• Having a source of ideas for stimulating innovation and technological development

Publications, Document Resources, Databases And Document Services are tools for disseminating information whereby the SPTO provides the public with the huge wealth of technological information that it possesses.

3.1 Publications

• The Official Industrial Property Gazette (BOPI), which contains legal-administrative and technical information on the files processed by the SPTO: distinctive signs (volume I); patents, utility models and semiconductor topographies (volume II); and industrial designs (volume III).

• International Classifications of patents, products and services for the registration of trademarks and of industrial drawings and models.

• INFO PI, an electronic magazine of the SPTO, which it has been publishing monthly since 2009.

• Other publications: techniques, logs, statistics, informative brochures, etc.

• Technology Watch Bulletins: Produced by the patent examiners of the SPTO. The objective of these electronic and sector publications is to provide timely, free, summarised and quick-reading information on a quarterly basis regarding advances and novelties in different technological sectors.

Some of these bulletins are produced entirely by the SPTO, while others are the result of cooperation with various entities and institutions.

SPTO Bulletins

•  Electric car
•  e-Dependence
•  Advanced mobile services and interfaces
•  Wireless sensor networks
•  Inteligent car

SPTO Bulletins - Technology Platforms Bulletins

•  Animal Health
•  Heath Biotechnology
•  Biomass
•  Fishing and Agriculture

SPTO-OPTI Bulletins

•  Footwear
•  Agri-food sector
•  Metal mechanical sector
•  Plastic transforming sector

SPTO-National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) Bulletins

•  Marine Energy

3.2 Document Resources

DOCUMENT RESOURCES contain a collection of patents comprising several million national and foreign documents, in addition to bulletins and publications from different countries. They may be consulted in the SPTO's Technical Library. Copies of individual documents are available, and they may be consulted and downloaded for free at the SPTO's web page.

3.3 Databases

The SPTO prepares and offers a series of Databases on the Internet that can be consulted free of charge:

•  Trade mark locator
•  File status
•  Inventions and Designs in Spanish: INVENES
•  GSA invention search
•  Inventions in other languages: Espacenet
•  Inventions in Spain and Latin America: Latipat-Espacenet
•  International Classification of Patents
•  International Classification of Trade Mark Products and Services: Clinmar
•  TMView: Trade Marks in Europe
•  Case Law Database
•  Digitised files

The SPTO also accepts orders to do retrospective searches regarding inventions, both national and international, subject to payment of a fee. Similarly, searches for phonetic similarities in the INPAMAR database can be requested for a fee, in addition to searches based on various criteria in the SITADEX database.

3.4 Document Services

The Document Services for Technological Information provided by the SPTO are the following:

• Customised Technology Watch Reports, which provide information, at the desired frequency, on patents published within and/or outside of Spain regarding the subject defined by the requesting party.

• Technological Reports of Patents, which provide an in-depth analysis of patents and utility models that have been published globally regarding a certain question posed by the requesting party (a possible patent application or utility model application, a research and/or development project, etc.). They include comments, lists of references recovered in databases and links to the most relevant documents.

• Advice from SPTO specialists.

A Modern Office

In the updating process that the SPTO has been carrying out in recent years, we would highlight the work to make it a paperless office, with an electronic headquarters, from where you can access the electronic procedures and services that the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office places at your disposal for the different types of Industrial Property.

A Visible Office

The SPTO can be found and makes itself visible on the Internet through the SPTO channel on youtube, through an account on scribd and through the information given through wikipedia.