Patent Search by Inventor: Find Patents Linked to a Person

You cannot run a public patent search by inventor name in Nepal. No such index exists. What does exist is a small national record at the Department of Industry, a statutory right to inspect a published patent's file, and foreign databases that do search by inventor but do not cover Nepal.

Key takeaways

• Nepal has recorded about 90 patents in total, against roughly 70,970 trade marks.
• Sec. 7A(1) publishes registered patents in the Nepal Gazette, not the Industrial Property Bulletin.
• The Bulletin, and IP Sewa's own search, carry trade marks only.
• Sec. 4(1)(a) makes the application name the inventor, so the name is on file even though nothing indexes it.
• Sec. 7A(2) lets anyone see or copy a published patent's particulars on paying the prescribed fee.
• Nepal is not in the Patent Cooperation Treaty, and WIPO's PATENTSCOPE coverage list does not include it.
• Term under Sec. 8 is seven years, with a renewal term under Sec. 23B twice over.

Can you search Nepali patents by inventor name?

No, not in any public system. The Department of Industry does not publish a searchable patent register, and the statutory publication route is the Nepal Gazette, which is a legal notice paper rather than a name-indexed database.

That is worth saying plainly, because a lot of writing about Nepali patent search implies a lookup facility that nobody can actually point you to.

It is also worth saying that the absence matters less here than it would elsewhere, for a reason that becomes obvious once you see the size of the national corpus.

How many patents are there in Nepal altogether?

About ninety. That is the cumulative figure printed in the Economic Survey 2082/83, Annex 8.3, attributed to the Department of Industry and current to Falgun 2082.

The same table records roughly 70,970 trade marks and 320 designs. So patents are not a large body of records with a missing index; they are a very small body of records with no index at all.

Ninety is small enough that a determined searcher can reasonably ask the Department about the whole set rather than trying to query it. We cover the aggregate picture in our Nepal patent statistics guide.

Where does a registered Nepali patent get published?

In the Nepal Gazette. Sec. 7A(1) of the Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act of 1965 says that patents registered under the Act, other than those which must be kept secret in the national interest, are published by the Department in the Nepal Gazette for the information of the public.

The word "Bulletin" does not appear anywhere in that Act. The Industrial Property Bulletin is a trade mark publication, and every one of the entries behind IP Sewa's own search is a published trade mark.

If an article tells you to review the Bulletin for patents, it is sending you to the wrong document. You can search published trade marks here, but no patent will ever appear in that result set.

Is the inventor's name recorded anywhere at all?

Yes, and this is the part most people miss. Sec. 4(1)(a) requires a patent application to state the name, address and occupation of the person inventing the patent.

Sec. 4(1)(b) goes further: if the applicant is not the inventor, the application must say how and in what manner the applicant acquired title from the inventor.

So the Department's own file answers the inventor question directly, including the ownership chain. The problem is purely one of access and indexing, not of missing data.

How do you get at a patent file legitimately?

Sec. 7A(2) is the provision that matters. Where anybody desires to see or copy the particulars, maps or drawings of a patent published under Sec. 7A(1), they may be allowed to do so after paying the fees prescribed by the Department.

That is a public right of inspection, and it applies to a published patent whoever you are. It is the closest thing Nepal has to a patent search, and it is a counter transaction rather than a query.

Notice the limit built into the wording. The right attaches to a patent that has been published under subsection (1), so it does not reach an application still under examination.

Why does the 35-day objection clock work differently for patents?

Because it runs from your own inspection. Sec. 7A(3) allows anyone with an objection to a published patent to complain to the Department within 35 days from the date of seeing or copying the patent under subsection (2).

Compare that with designs and trade marks, where Sec. 21A runs the 35-day and 90-day windows from publication itself. For patents the clock is personal to the person who went and looked.

Any article giving you a flat "35 days from publication" for a Nepali patent has paraphrased away the operative words. Confirm the position with an advocate before you rely on either reading.

What records exist, and who may see them?

The last row is the one that decides commercial questions. A patent that was never renewed under Sec. 23B is cancelled, and an old Gazette notice will not tell you that.

What should you actually do, step by step?

1. Decide what you need. Whether a named person is on a Nepali filing is a different question from whether a technology is protected here.
2. Collect identifiers. Full name and spelling variants, Devanagari spelling, employer, technical field and a likely period.
3. Write to the Department. Ask about published patents in the field and period, and ask what inspection under Sec. 7A(2) requires.
4. Inspect rather than infer. Read the particulars and drawings; the inventor's name under Sec. 4(1)(a) is in the file, not in any notice.
5. Separate the three roles. Inventor, applicant and current owner are frequently three different answers.
6. Check the right is alive. Confirm registration date, renewals and any recorded transfer before you act on anything.

Do foreign patent databases cover Nepal?

Not as far as we can find. WIPO's PATENTSCOPE data-coverage page lists the national and regional collections it carries, and Nepal is not among them, as we read it at the end of September 2026.

That follows from how those services are built. They index what patent offices supply in bulk electronic form, and Nepal's office publishes in a Gazette rather than in a data feed.

Nepal is also outside the Patent Cooperation Treaty, so there are no published international applications designating Nepal to pick up either. Our guide to international patent filing from Nepal explains what that means for a Nepali applicant.

So when is an inventor-name search worth doing?

When the inventor filed somewhere else. A Nepali researcher who worked abroad, or a company that filed first in India, Europe or the United States, will show up in databases that do index inventor names.

WIPO runs PATENTSCOPE with an inventor-name field, and you can start from the WIPO site to reach it. European and United States office search services offer the same kind of field.

A hit there tells you what the person invented and when, which is genuine intelligence. It tells you nothing about whether anything is protected in Nepal, because protection here requires a national filing.

What should you have ready before you ask?

An inspection request is answered faster when it is specific, and the Department is being asked to pull paper rather than run a query. Gather the identifiers below before you write, and be honest in the request about which of them you are unsure of.

Timing is worth adding to the file as well, because Nepal works on a first-to-file basis and the filing date is frequently the fact that decides a competing claim.

Why is inventor not the same as owner?

Because the Act keeps them apart on purpose. The inventor is the person who made the invention; the applicant is whoever files; the registered owner is whoever the Department records under Sec. 7.

An employer that funds the work is very often the applicant and the owner, while the engineer is named only in the file under Sec. 4(1)(a). Finding the name proves contribution, not entitlement.

Where an agent files on someone's behalf, a power of attorney sits in the file too, which is another reason the paper matters more than the notice.

What would this look like in practice?

Suppose an investor is told that a Nepali engineer holds a patent on a grain dryer, and wants that confirmed before committing money.

The honest answer is that no website will confirm it. The work is to ask the Department what is published in that field, inspect any relevant patent under Sec. 7A(2), read the inventor and title particulars, and then check the renewal position.

If the answer comes back that the filing is Indian rather than Nepali, the technology is unprotected here and anyone may work it. This is an illustration, not a real case, but that outcome is common.

How long does the right last?

Under Sec. 8, a patentee's title is valid for seven years from the date of registration under Sec. 7, unless renewed under Sec. 23B.

Sec. 23B allows a patent to be renewed not more than twice, for seven years at a time, which gives a ceiling of twenty-one years. Renewal is due within 35 days of expiry, with a late window of six months on a fine, after which registration is automatically cancelled.

So a patent registered more than twenty-one years ago cannot still be in force, however impressive the Gazette notice looks. Our patent renewal guide sets out the mechanics.

Common mistakes

• Searching the Industrial Property Bulletin for patents. It carries trade marks. Sec. 7A(1) points at the Gazette.
• Reading a Gazette notice as a grant of ownership to the inventor. The named applicant is usually the owner.
• Quoting a trademark timeline for a patent. Published processing figures for marks do not transfer.
• Assuming a foreign patent reaches Nepal. With no Patent Cooperation Treaty membership, it does not.
• Stopping at publication. Without a renewal check you do not know whether the right survives.
• Reading the title instead of the claims. Scope lives in the specification, not in a headline.

Where does IP Sewa fit?

We file and prosecute patents at the Department, so patent registration and the record work around it is our ground. We do not operate a patent search tool, and we will not pretend the country has one.

Our public database is trade marks only, which is also what the owner and applicant search covers. Do not use it as a patent index.

The Department's own site is at doind.gov.np, and its industrial property section is the right place to address an inspection request.

In short

Nepal has no public inventor-name patent search, because it has no public patent index and only about ninety records to index. The inventor's name is in the file, and Sec. 7A(2) is how you reach it.

For anything beyond Nepal, use a foreign database with an inventor field, and remember that protection here still requires a national filing.

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The consolidated text of the Act is published by the Nepal Law Commission, and Sec. 4 and Sec. 7A repay a careful read before you write to anyone. If you need a Nepali filing made or a published patent inspected, contact our team and we will tell you what the record can and cannot show.