Our Services — Information for you, exchange with you
Do you have any questions about the registration process, the costs or would you like to know more about the search options? Do you offer information yourself and would like to have access to our databases? Under the motto ‘Helping people to help themselves’, the DPMA offers you a varied and comprehensive range of information on its website. In addition, you can also contact the Customer Care and Services of the DPMA directly with questions and concerns relating to intellectual property.
Customer Care and Services
Telephone: +49 892195-1000
(Monday to Thursday 8:00-16:00,
Friday from 8:00-14:00)
E-mail: info@dpma.de
If you would like to receive general information, make an appointment on site, give us a call, send us an e-mail or, in the traditional way, send us a letter. The Customer Care and Services team will be happy to provide you with information on correct IP applications or on the progress of applications that have already been filed.
Online applications 2023
Design applications
National patent applications
National trade mark applications
National utility model applications
Customer enquiries in 2023
We provided information and assistance over 50,000 times in 2023:
Customer contacts by communication channel in 2023
1 Customer contacts at trade fairs and at the research workshops and WebEx training courses offered were not consistently recorded in the Omnitracker ticket system in 2023. A higher number of visitors can therefore be assumed overall.
You can search the DPMAregister and DEPATISnet databases online at any time. File inspection is also possible online via DPMAregister. Search assistance is available by telephone or e-mail. In Berlin and Munich, you can also receive on-site search assistance if you consider the telephone exchange to be insufficient. Our Customer Care and Services will be pleased to arrange an appointment with you.
Free initial consultations for inventors provided by patent attorneys are offered nationwide by various institutions in many cities in cooperation with the Chamber of Patent Attorneys. Experienced patent attorneys will advise you on your application. In Munich and Berlin, these consultations take place in rooms of the DPMA. Attorneys-at-law are also available to answer your questions on non-technical IP rights.
To make an appointment, please contact the Central Customer Care and Services at +49 89 2195-1000 or by e-mail at info@dpma.de with the subject “Appointment — consultation for inventors in Munich or consultation for inventors in Berlin” in good time.
This issue includes an interview with a patent attorney who has been supporting us for many years with initial consultations for inventors in Berlin and who will share his experiences with the readers.
In order to provide you with a good basis and detailed insights into the search options of the DPMA databases, you can participate in a series of workshops and seminars organised by us. In particular, small and medium-sized enterprises, but also interested individuals, lawyer’s offices or chambers of industry and commerce should be given the opportunity to find uncomplicated access to the search in the DPMA databases and to effectively use the corresponding options and features — in particular, the DPMAregister and DEPATISnet databases. In 2023, the focus of our efforts in this regard was on the online services of DPMAregister. The workshops on our search options will also be presented at events such as PATINFO or the DPMAnutzerforum. Are you interested? Then you will find our current range of seminars on our website.
In addition to good services and products, up-to-date, easily accessible information channels are the essence of any company. This also applies to the German Patent and Trade Mark Office. If you want to find out more about the services of the DPMA, you can obtain information on IP protection through various channels and in various output formats – almost completely in two languages (German and English). We offer you comprehensive information on patents, utility models, trade marks and designs, on searches, our electronic services and various events on our website, on our social media channels or via various print formats. We are increasingly focussing on digital services, but are still keeping an eye on the print world.
A number of brochures are available both online and in printed, bound versions; the annual report is available as a PDF and in a completely digital version. On our LinkedIn channel, you will find current information about the DPMA as well as interesting short news items of a more general nature. And on YouTube we provide tutorials and valuable background information on IP rights, searches and events. Feel free to follow us!
In addition to our usual news — Announcements, Important Notices and Notices of the President — and the traditional information on our IP rights, we also publish special information on IP protection and interesting facts from research and technology. For this purpose, we issue various newsletters and special publications, such as our Erfinderaktivitäten (inventor activities), the DPMAinformativ series for special topics on patent information and, last but not least, our monthly journal Blatt für Patent-, Muster- und Zeichenwesen (BlPMZ), which is dedicated to legal issues, but above all, selected decisions of the courts and notices on the representative system. Our website gives you access to these free publications as well as to the latest issue of BlPMZ, which is published in co-operation with Carl Heymanns Verlag. The monthly issue is free of charge, the annual subscription is subject to a charge.
The DPMAregister and DEPATISnet databases are freely accessible and can be used free of charge. You can search patents, utility models, trade marks and designs in these databases: DPMAregister enables you to view the DPMA’s register of legal and procedural status information; DEPATISnet provides you with an overview of the state of the art worldwide. With DPMAkurier you can monitor IP rights and receive the results automatically by e-mail. DPMAconnectPlus enables you to automatically retrieve all official register and publication data from DPMAregister online and to download patent and utility model specifications from the DEPATIS document archive.
Trade fairs are hotspots for innovation and development. But how well do people understand IP rights and their limits? At trade fairs, we realise that the need for information is high. What are IP rights, what do they have to do with me and my product and how is an IP right filed at all? The questions are many and varied, and regardless of whether we are on site with an exhibition stand or travelling with mobile teams, there are always interesting discussions where we can provide people and companies with helpful information. At the same time, we have a preventive effect against product piracy and raise awareness of how to deal with counterfeiting: a win-win situation for everyone. In 2023, at a total of 19 national trade fairs, we were able to realise our mission, that is to bring information, experience and knowledge about intellectual property and IP rights to those who benefit from it. We look forward to meeting you at a trade fair. You can find our current trade fair planning for 2024 in our trade fair calendar.
We know that together we are strong. For many years, our cooperation with the patent information centres (PIZ) has proven its worth. As our exclusive regional partners, the patent information centres are located throughout Germany and provide a wealth of valuable information on IP rights and how to search for them. They also provide advice on IP strategies and exploitation options. You can read about the entire service portfolio, which is primarily aimed at SMEs, start-ups, founders and the university sector, here.
Moreover, you can read the interesting interview with Ms Gerlach, Head of PIZ Chemnitz, and find out more about our joint activities in 2023.
Are you not satisfied with our services? Please let us know. Describe your concerns and send them to info@dpma.de or by post. Please note: This does not apply to complaints in the sense of a formal legal remedy; in this case, the rules and procedures of the respective property rights apply.
Your general written complaints will be analysed and your request will be answered in close cooperation with all departments involved. This always reveals potential for improvement. Thank you for drawing our attention to this.
Overview News from the IT services
In February 2023, there was a change of the digitisation centre of the electronic IP case file processing to introduce legally secure scanning as a replacement service, so the retention of paper documents for evidentiary purposes is no longer unnecessary.
This was made possible by an amendment to the Ordinance on the Keeping of Electronic Files at the Patent Office, the Patent Court and the Federal Court of Justice (Verordnung über die elektronische Aktenführung bei dem Patentamt, dem Patentgericht und dem Bundesgerichtshof), which entered into force on 1 May 2022 with the Second Act to Simplify and Modernise Patent Law (Zweites Gesetz zur Vereinfachung und Modernisierung des Patentrechts). The amendment provides that, with respect to all files kept electronically, the DPMA is required to keep the electronic reproductions of documents received on paper and to destroy or return the paper documents.
To ensure the consistency between the paper document and its digital version when a paper document is converted into a digital document according to the state of the art, the technical guidelines for legally secure scanning as a replacement service (Technische Richtlinie Rechtssicheres ersetzendes Scannen) of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) were applied. If adhered to, these guidelines facilitate the preparation and application of legally secure scanning solutions.
Subsequently, various technical, organisational and spatial measures were implemented to fulfil the requirements of the guidelines. In the following months, large volumes of paper documents were already destroyed and large amounts of storage space at the DPMA were cleared.
With the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court, another amendment to be reflected in the IT systems of the DPMA entered into force on 1 June 2023. The conception of necessary IT adjustments had been started well in advance, but the date on which the adjustments were to be made available had not yet been known — the decisive date was to be the date the Agreement would be ratified by the Federal Republic of Germany.
Extensive adjustments in the IT system concerned were necessary for the change. For example, the regular use of the publication information of the EPO now also provides information on Unitary Patents and their procedural status that has to be processed and presented. Furthermore, an IT solution had to be implemented that examines the correctness of the quarterly statement of account of the annual fees for Unitary Patents (and thus the proportionate payment transmitted by the EPA to the DPMA).
All adjustments to the IT systems were completed at the beginning of 2023. The agreement was ratified on February 17th. Accordingly, the DPMA was ready in time for the introduction of the Unitary Patent in the summer of 2023, and this great improvement for applicants of patents in Europe could become a reality.
In 2023, extensive changes to the DPMAdirektPro and DPMAdirektWeb services were prepared in order to update the applications to the latest technology. An improvement that has become visible for users in the user interface is the option to subsequently optimise graphic trade mark representations in the application process. The cutting tool (frame adjustment) integrated into DPMAdirekt allows images to be adjusted to show their essential content and allows their file size to be reduced. Thanks to this additional function, the need for clarification following the filing of an application is reduced considerably.
Overview Electronic services
The following e-services are available to our customers:
- Online search in the bibliographic data as well as in the legal and procedural status data
- You can produce an uncertified excerpt from the register yourself
- You can inspect the various parts of a patent case file online
- You can choose between three different search modes: basic, advanced or expert
- NEW: Filter for result lists concerning all IP rights
- NEW: Leave restriction of search results according to IP classes or other criteria
- NEW: Statistical analysis of results by using the filter
- Document archive with clearly more than 100 million data records from about 100 countries; you will receive almost 60% of these data records directly as PDF
- You can conduct online searches for prior art published in patent literature from all over the world
- NEW: IPC ranking for result list
- NEW: Analysis of search results with regard to IPC classes after a search
- NEW: Convenient export of the new IPC ranking to a CSV file
DPMAdirektPro
- Legally valid online filing of applications for all IP rights
- You need a special software, which we provide to you free of charge, as well as a qualified signature card
- You can register for the electronic document mailing service
DPMAdirektWeb
- Legally valid online filing of applications for trade marks and designs as well as international registration of marks
- Contrary to DPMAdirektPro, no signature card or special software is required
- NEW: Automatic cropping function of graphic trade mark representations
- Legal status monitoring of certain IP rights
- You can subscribe to receive IP gazettes/journals by e-mail
- You can submit combinations of applicant/inventor/owner as well as of classification symbols
- NEW: Export of a monitoring profile
- NEW: Backup of DPMAkurier monitoring in a file or transfer to other DPMAkurier accounts
- Establishment of an interface, which provides automated access to all official register and publication data from DPMAregister
- You can download patent and utility model documents from the DEPATIS document archive through an interface
- Facsimile documents of DE, DD, EP and WO documents as well as optionally the corresponding bibliographic data
- We provide you weekly with the current data and documents of the German IP rights in the form of data packages
Detailed information on our IT developments and e-services is available on our website.
E-filing of IP applications and
Search