It also provides data about the legal status (pending, issued, abandoned, expired) for patent documents in many countries and for large time periods.
INPADOC was founded by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the government of Austria under an agreement on May 2, 1972.
[4][5] In 2003 the backlog of the legal status database was cleared up, and the physical storage of electronic records was established in The Hague.
Approximately 130,000 bibliographic records from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore and Brunei covering years between 1990 and 2003 were added in 1991, albeit their availability was initially limited to CD-ROM format only.
Also in 2005, several commercial database developers (e.g. Anacubis, Minesoft, PatentInformatics and Questel-Orbit) offered access to enhanced INPADOC data and search functionality for a fee.