What is a Provisional Patent Application?

A Provisional Patent Application is an official document that, like any other patent applications, establishes priority preventing others from using, selling and manufacturing the invention.

From a legal standpoint, a Provisional Patent Application doesn't require any formal claims or declaration. 

Within the next 12 months of pendency period, the filer is required to file the corresponding non-provisional Patent Application which must contain a specific reference to the provisional document.

PatSnap covers 11 Jurisdictions (Great Britain, Italy, Israel, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Spain, Brazil, Hungary, Denmark and the USA) plus all the ARIPO members.

Differently to patent applications, provisional patent applications generally have a unique Kind code (D0).

This worldwide standardization facilitates the research. In PatSnap, the query KD:D0 (where KD is the abbreviation of Kind Code) will return the list of all Provisional Patent Applications within our database except for the USA where in this case the query would be KD:P0.