How many patent offices use IPC?
The Strasbourg Agreement has more than 50 Member States, but the IPC is used in more than hundred countries of the world. IPC is the lingua franca of the patent classification. There are 3 important classification systems used in addition by the largest patent offices (US, EP, JP). Out of these, the European and the Japanese system have very close links to IPC. According to the estimations more than 28million patent documents can be found using IPC based searching.
