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Search rooms

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Whether you wish to search for specific intellectual property rights or the state of the art, the staff in the search rooms will help you select the appropriate search tools and will be happy to explain how to use them.

Please make an appointment for your visit (contact details to make an appointment).

You have access to the following information sources in the search rooms:

  • the publicly accessible official register of German patents, utility models, trade marks and designs DPMAregister with up-to-date legal and procedural status information and file inspection in patent and utility model procedures
  • the publicly accessible DPMA-internal electronic document archive of German and foreign patent documents DEPATISnet, DEPATIS work stations (access to the "search file" of the patent examiners) as well as conventional collections of patent documents on other types of media
  • national and foreign patent, trade mark and design gazettes
  • trade mark databases and encyclopedias
  • design index, arranged by classes of goods (the index comprises the German register (index) cards from 1988 to 2003)
  • search tools such as the classifications of the individual IP rights (for example, International Patent Classification)
  • collections of standards, such as DIN, ISO, ASTM - it is not allowed to copy most of the documents
  • the DPMA’s search portal externer Link DPMAprimo for searches for printed and electronic literature from the DPMA stocks with focus on technology, science and industrial property, including automatic integration of an external data index for searches in a huge range of scientific literature with multiple hundreds of millions of data records

All kinds of documents may be used there, but no documents may be taken out of the search rooms.

Munich search room

The Munich search room offers DEPATIS work stations.

Please make an appointment for your visit (contact details to make an appointment).

Berlin search room

In addition to DEPATIS stations, several CD-ROM workstations are available in the Berlin search room for searching for German and foreign patents, utility models, designs and trade marks.
The patent document collections from Eastern Europe and the USSR/Russia (from 1924) are also worthy of special mention. As a rule, these documents are not included in DEPATIS. In addition, the DPMA-IDZ Berlin provides numerous information resources for searches for searches for historical IP rights.

Please make an appointment for your visit (contact details to make an appointment).

Terms and conditions

The terms and conditions of use of our search rooms are available for inspection in the search rooms. An overview of possible charges is available in the (in German).

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Picture: iStock.com/jacobammentorplund

Last updated: 8 July 2026