SEP Information in PATENTSCOPE: FAQs

WIPO’s global patent database, PATENTSCOPE, provides information on patents that have been declared as potentially essential to standards at certain Standards Development Organizations (SDOs). PATENTSCOPE also integrates standard essentiality verification information provided by certain patent pool administrators. 

These FAQs explain the objective and scope of this initiative, how the information is collected and presented in PATENTSCOPE, and the limitations users should be aware of when interpreting it.

This twin initiative is grounded in the WIPO Strategy on Standard Essential Patents, which positions WIPO as a source of information and a facilitator of collaboration across the SEP landscape. WIPO is committed to continuing its engagement with stakeholders to expand verified data sources and strengthen tools that support the global SEP community. 

Transparency is a common theme in the discourse around standard essential patents (SEPs). One of the most often articulated concerns in this regard is the scarcity of information on essentiality.  

WIPO’s initiative builds on existing data, displaying available SEP-related information free of charge in its global patent database PATENTSCOPE. WIPO is partnering with interested SDOs and patent pool administrators to integrate relevant data from their public sources. There is a natural advantage in channeling distinct SEP datasets into a general global patent database: it places such data in its own environment, with uniform associated information. 

The more data can be imported from various data sources, the more comprehensive the patent database becomes. While completeness may not be reachable, the goal of integrating information from a critical mass of contributors points towards a valuable global public resource. 

Currently, there are two sources of SEP-related information integrated into PATENTSCOPE: SDOs and patent pool administrators. The SEP data published by such entities differ in nature: 

  • SDOs enter essentiality declarations from the patent owners made under the SDOs’ IPR policy (usually accompanied by a (F)RAND or royalty free licensing undertaking) into their patent databases, and 

  • Patent pool administrators publish lists for their licensing programs with patents verified for essentiality in a process that the pool administrator applies. 

Where a patent record in PATENTSCOPE corresponds to a patent number in the above datasets, that patent record will be furnished with a new tab called “SEP info”. Clicking on this tab, the available data from either source will become visible in separate sections: 

  • one for the cases where they have been identified in a SEP declaration at one of the collaborating SDOs under their respective IPR policies (titled “Patent declared as standard essential”); and 

  • another one for the cases where they are featured in one or more patent lists for specific licensing programs run by a patent pool administrator that shared such lists with WIPO for data inclusion (titled “Essentiality verified in the process of a patent pool administrator”). 

For the information on essentiality declarations, WIPO currently works with three SDOs: 

  • the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI); 

  • the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Association (IEEE SA); 

  • the International Telecommunications Union, Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). 

For the information on pool-verified lists of SEPs for their licensing programs, WIPO currently works with two patent pool administrators: 

  • Sisvel (for their 5G Multimode, Wi-Fi Multimode, Cellular IoT, MIOTY and DVB licensing programs); and 

  • Via Licensing Alliance (for their AAC, AVC/H.264 and Qi Wireless Power licensing programs). 

WIPO is working with its current pool administrator partners to ensure as broad a coverage as possible, gradually adding more patent lists from additional pools into PATENTSCOPE. 

No. WIPO is only working with data that is already published by SDOs or patent pool administrators. “SEP info” in PATENTSCOPE is, however, more than mere re-publishing of information, for the following reasons: 

  • The data are integrated into PATENTSCOPE, matching information from the data sources to the patent records in PATENTSCOPE, presented in a unified manner featuring key associated data, and made searchable according to several search terms. 

  • The information displayed under the “SEP info” tab provides direct links to the original data sources and to associated documents (relevant standards, declarations, licensing programs), where linking was technically feasible based on the data provided by the collaborators. 

  • Obvious clerical errors in the source databases are identified for more matches, in the interest of the broadest possible coverage of imported data. However, no tentative or speculative matching took place: only data that can be unambiguously matched with a PATENTSCOPE record were incorporated. 

Disclosing patents that might become essential to the implementation of the standard is an obligation that SDO IPR policies routinely prescribe to contributing members. The patents declared in SEP disclosures are only tentatively essential for several reasons: 

  • as they are communicated before the standard is adopted, they may eventually fall out of the standard’s final scope, and no review mechanism is foreseen at SDOs; 

  • the declared patents’ scope may change over time, e.g., by way of post-grant limitations; 

  • it may only be certain claims that are essential to the standard, which may, in turn, differ across jurisdictions; 

  • even where a patent is truly essential to the implementation of a standard, certain use cases that involve such implementation do not necessitate the use of the invention that is protected by a certain SEP; 

  • the essentiality is based on the contributors’ self-assessment, and no independent assessment is required for the declaration to be made. 

This means that the PATENTSCOPE records bearing information in the “Patent declared as standard essential” section are not necessarily standard essential patents. What it shows is that the given patent was individually included in a disclosure document submitted by a declarant to an SDO, and a link was possible to establish between the declared patent and the PATENTSCOPE record. 

In contrast, the section called “Essentiality verified in the process of a patent pool administrator” contains information sourced from patent pool administrators. Generally, when patent pool administrators build their licensing programs for a certain use case of the implementation of a standard (for example, the Wi-Fi Multimode pool to implement the IEEE 802.11 standard by Sisvel; or the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) pool by Via-LA), they publish a list of patents that are included in the licensing programs after having undergone a certain essentiality verification process as determined by the pool administrator.  

WIPO imports the patents on these lists to PATENTSCOPE. The key differences compared to the declaration data from SDOs are, therefore, that these patents 

  • are associated to specific licensing programs managed by the pool administrators; 

  • have undergone some kind of essentiality verification specific to the use case covered by the licensing program. 

It should be noted that not all patents licensed through a SEP patent pool undergo formal essentiality verification, for instance because of cost and resource limitations. The lists of pool-verified SEPs are therefore intended to be illustrative only and should not be considered exhaustive of the patents owned or controlled by participating patent owners that are available for licensing through the pool. 

For the declared SEPs, the relevant section in a PATENTSCOPE record displays the following information in table format:

  • Essentiality Declaration Date: the date on the disclosure made at the SDO by the declarant. 

  • Essentiality Declaration Number: the number of the disclosure made at the SDO by the declarant listing the patent in question. 

  • Standard Developing Organization: the SDO at which the declaration was made. 

  • Declarant: the entity making the declaration (this term is used as this may be different from the applicant featured in PATENTSCOPE). Standard: the standard to which the declared patent is deemed to be or become essential according to the declarant. 

  • ETSI Family Extension: only for declarations made at ETSI, since July 2026, PATENTSCOPE includes patent records that are in the ETSI IPR Online Database by way of ETSI’s extension to family members not explicitly disclosed in the declaration, according to ETSI’s definition of a patent family. 

  • Additional information: where available, information on the licensing conditions attached to the SEP declaration. 

For pool-verified SEPs, the relevant section in a PATENTSCOPE record displays the following information in table format: 

  • Patent Pool Administrator: the designation of the licensing program’s manager entity (the source of the patent list). Licensing Program: the patent pool the license is offered for. 

  • Standards Body: the standardization organization that adopted the standard needed for the use case of the licensing program (including standardization consortia such as 3GPP, hence the broader term compared to SDOs). 

  • Standard: the standard to which the listed patent is deemed to be essential according to the pool’s verification process. 

  • Licensor: the entity that offers the patent for licensing via the patent pool (this may refer to an entity within a broader corporate group and not necessarily the actual legal owner or assignee of the patent: the patent may be held by a different entity within the same corporate structure, such as a subsidiary, affiliate, or related company). 

  • European Patent Coverage: where the listed patent is a European patent, the countries where the European patent was made effective after grant. 

For the sake of convenience, both “SEP info” sections have active hyperlinks that grant instant access to documents at the data sources – where linking was technically feasible based on the data provided by the collaborators. 

In certain cases, the collaborating partner ensures reciprocity: the patent database of ITU-T based on declarations provides direct links to the relevant PATENTSCOPE records. 

No. WIPO does not verify or endorse the essentiality of the declared SEPs, or the accuracy of the information provided by the patent pool administrators. In case of questions regarding the pool administrators’ verification processes, please contact the respective pool administrator. 

There is no inference on non-essentiality to be made based on the absence of “SEP info” in a PATENTSCOPE record. In other words, a patent without SEP data in PATENTSCOPE can still be a SEP. In these cases, several reasons can explain why there is no associated data imported from the sources WIPO works with, including: 

  • Limitations in the geographical coverage of PATENTSCOPE;

  • No unambiguous match between a patent number and a PATENTSCOPE record;

  • The SDO or patent pool administrator is currently not a collaborating partner of WIPO;

  • The licensing program of a collaborating pool administrator is not yet included;

  • The data was furnished after the last update of PATENTSCOPE;

  • The patent was not individually listed in the disclosure (e.g., blanket declarations);

  • There is no pool license available for the given patent.

WIPO does not search for any patent family extensions. Where members of the same patent family are integrated into PATENTSCOPE under the SEP initiative, it is either

  • because the declarations made at SDOs or the patent pool administrators have listed them specifically, or 

  • because ETSI extended the disclosed patents to their family members and displayed them as such in the ETSI IPR Online Database. 

Starting July 2026, PATENTSCOPE displays SEP information on patents that are in the ETSI IPR Online Database by way of ETSI’s extension to family members not explicitly disclosed in the declaration, according to ETSI’s definition of a patent family under Clause 15.13 of its IPR Policy. 

The “ETSI Family Extension” column in the “Patent declared as standard essential” section displays three categories of records : 

  • Basis Patent (the patent the declaration is based on); 

  • Explicitly Disclosed (family members voluntarily listed in the declaration); and 

  • Extended (patents that were not originally declared, but were subsequently linked by ETSI to a declared patent as a family member, and imported from EPO’s EspaceNet, based on the Basis Patent’s priority information). 

[Note: For SEP records from ITU and IEEE, N/A is displayed in this column]

As regards pool-verified SEPs, the essentiality verification indicated by patent pool administrators may not cover every member of the same patent family. 

Patent publication or application numbers disclosed in SDOs' patent declaration databases and listed in patent pool administrators' licensing programs are matched with PATENTSCOPE patent records. To ensure reliability, PATENTSCOPE's extensive coverage of millions of patent documents is used to corroborate matches and settle doubtful cases. Where available, additional information such as publication dates, titles, and declarant names are used to validate the matching. In some cases, source PDFs are manually checked to find the right match. No AI methods are used for the linking process, but machine-based scoring is applied to assess matching accuracy. Records where doubts remain are flagged, reviewed, and if unresolved, excluded from the dataset to ensure quality. 

WIPO’s commitment is to update the SEP datasets at least once a year, and up to twice a year when possible, depending on the collaborators providing their fresh datasets. Updates are done on a source-by-source basis – this means that different sources may be updated at different times. 

Users can search PATENTSCOPE for patent records that feature SEP information with different search queries (no exact match needed). Relevant records can be browsed by searching for 

  • Declarants or Licensors (query: “SEP_DL:”, or use the “SEP Declarant/Licensor” field in one of the PATENTSCOPE Field Combination page’s drop-down menus); 

  • Patent pool administrators (query: “SEP_PPA:”, or use the “SEP Patent Pool Administrator” field in one of the PATENTSCOPE Field Combination page’s drop-down menus); 

  • Standards (query: “SEP_STD:”, or use the “SEP Standard” field in one of the PATENTSCOPE Field Combination page’s drop-down menus); 

  • SDOs (query: “SEP_SDO:”, or use the “SEP Standard Developing Organization” field in one of the PATENTSCOPE Field Combination page’s drop-down menus); 

  • Standards Bodies (query: “SEP_SBDY:”, or use the “SEP Standards Body” field in one of the PATENTSCOPE Field Combination page’s drop-down menus). [Note: This search query is reserved for the pool-verified SEP data, as it includes standardization bodies that are not per se SDOs, but a consortium of SDOs (see 3GPP), which is not present in the Declared SEP feature.] 

PATENTSCOPE’s statistics (“Analysis” view) are available on countries, applicants, inventors, IPC codes, and publication dates in numeric (filters) and chart formats. 

The “cheat sheet” document titled “How to search” explains by way of practical examples how SEP-related information can be retrieved in PATENTSCOPE. 

SEP information in PATENTSCOPE is useful for a wide range of users, including researchers, companies, and legal practitioners. It represents a practical starting point for identifying patent records that are present in either a SEP declaration at the collaborating SDOs or a listing in a covered pool licensing program, and retrieving further records based on a search within the same category (standard, declarant/licensor or pool administrator). 

When reading aggregate data, it is important to keep in mind that the figures reflect patent records matched and available in PATENTSCOPE and should not be interpreted as a complete or definitive count of SEPs for any given standard, licensing program, technology area; or regarded as a proxy for the magnitude of contribution of those patents to the standardized technology. As noted above, not every patent owned or controlled by patent owners contributing to patent pools is formally evaluated, and SEP declarations do not establish essentiality. Consequently, any analysis (be it related to SEP due diligence, portfolio assessment, preparation for licensing discussions or SEP landscaping) should be considered preliminary in nature. 

Given the premise that WIPO is working with data from collaborating partners, precedence is always given to the data source. In case of discrepancies or inaccuracies in, or questions about the information displayed under the “SEP Info” tab, please contact the PATENTSCOPE team.