Cookies

Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

  • enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task
  • recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
  • measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there's enough capacity to ensure they are fast

For information on how to control and delete cookies, visit aboutcookies.org External Link.

Our use of cookies

The Intellectual Property Office website uses cookies to:

  • remember your preference settings for some of our online services;
  • improve our understanding of how people use our website, through web analytics;
  • measure the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns.

We do not use these cookies to identify you personally and we never share this information with other organisations for marketing, market research or commercial purposes.

Cookies for managing your current visit

These cookies are set by our website and are also referred to as 'first-party' cookies. They are used to remember the selections or preferences that you’ve made when looking at the information on this site.

usertype

  • Purpose: Users have the option to use the standard or IP Professional version of our website. This cookie remembers your preferred route.
  • Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
  • Data stored by cookie: An identifier that your preference is to use the IP Professional side of our site.
  • Duration of cookie: 38 days.

leg

  • Purpose: Used to maintain the continuity of the site navigation when in the standard or IP Professional side of the site.
  • Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
  • Data stored by cookie: An identifier as to whether you are using the standard or IP Professional side of the website.
  • Duration of cookie: Expires when you close your browser.

nomnom

  • Purpose: When you arrive at this site for the first time, you see a coloured banner at the top of each page alerting you to our use of cookies. This cookie remembers when you have clicked the "hide this" button.
  • Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
  • Data stored by cookie: An instruction to hide the banner.
  • Duration of cookie: 1000 days.

ASP.NET_SessionId

  • Purpose: A 'session identifier', which allows the site to recognise your movement around the site as being from one computer.
  • Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the session; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: Expires when you close your browser.

UKIPO_TMWEBFORMS_SESSION_DETECT

  • Purpose: Used by our TM3, TM6 and TM7a web applications to detect if you have disabled cookies.
  • Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the session; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: Expires when you close your browser.

UKIPO_InterSearch_PickList

  • Purpose: Used by the TM Enquiry service to remember search results you have added to your pick list.
  • Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the session; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: 7 days.

DMW_DOCBASE; DMW_SESSIONID; DMW_AUTHORIZATION

  • Purpose: Session identifiers, used by our Designs image search application.
  • Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the session; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: Expires when you close your browser.

sessionKey

  • Purpose: Session identifier, used by our trade marks e-caveat service.
  • Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the session; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: Expires when you close your browser.

IPODTCookie

  • Purpose: Session identifer, used by the IP Health Check online tool.
  • Benefit: To keep you logged into the online tool.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the session; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: Expires when you close your browser.

bl

  • Purpose: Used by some of our web applications to identify if you have come to us via the businesslink website.
  • Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the session; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: Expires when you close your browser.

cfduid

  • Purpose: Helps detect malicious users and minimizes blocking legitimate users from using the service.
  • Benefit: To enable genuine users of our site to have the most fluid experience while automated systems are prevented from saturating our computing resources with requests.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the state of a security checks; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: 30 days.

_cf_bm

  • Purpose: Used to manage incoming traffic that matches criteria associated with automated internet robots (bots).
  • Benefit: To enable genuine users of our site to have the most fluid experience while automated systems are prevented from saturating our computing resources with requests.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the state of a security checks; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: 30 minutes.

ANONID & DUG

  • Purpose: A 'session identifier'; To manage automated traffic visiting our website.
  • Benefit: To enable genuine users of our site to have the most fluid experience while automated systems are prevented from saturating our computing resources with requests.
  • Data stored by cookie: Information about the state of a security check; the cookie itself contains no personal information.
  • Duration of cookie: Expires when you close your browser.

IPOShowPatentIntro

  • Purpose: When accessing the 'Apply for a UK patent' service from GOV.UK, you are directed to an introduction page advising the use of an IP professional. This cookie remembers when you have selected the 'don't show this page again' option.
  • Benefit: To remember the selection you’ve made when revisiting the service.
  • Data stored by cookie: An instruction to hide the introduction page and redirect you straight to the 'Apply for a UK Patent' service.
  • Duration of cookie: 1000 days.

Cookies for measuring website usage

We use Urchin software from Google to collect information about how people use this site. We do this to make sure it’s meeting your needs and to understand how we could do it better.

Urchin stores information about what pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and what you click on. We do not collect or store your personal information (e.g. your name or address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are.

We do not allow external organisations to access, use or share any of this analytics data, which is stored on in-house servers.

_utma; _utmb; _utmc; _utmz

  • Purpose: To record how many people are using our website and how they move around it:
       _utma tracks how many times you have visited our website before.
      _utmb and _utmc are connected, and track how long you stay on the site.
      _utmz tracks identifies where you've come from e.g. from a search engine or from another website.
  • Benefit: So service is available when you want it and fast, we measure numbers and volumes of visitors.
  • Data stored by cookies: No personal information about you, just information about your computer and your browser.
  • Duration of cookies:
       _utma: Expires 2 years after your last visit to this site.
      _utmb: Expires 30 minutes after your visit, or after 30 minutes of inactivity.
      _utmc: Expires when you close your browser.
      _utmz: Expires 6 months after it was last set.

Third party cookies

SurveyMonkey: ep201, ep202, TSc1209a, TS54026e, TS39fa47

  • Purpose: We sometimes link to online surveys (website satisfaction survey for example) created using Survey Monkey External Link. These cookies may be set if you follow one of these links to complete a survey.
  • Benefit: When we provide links to third party services you find useful, they may place a cookie on your device to make their service easier to use.
  • Data stored by the cookie: None contains personal information; all data is used in aggregate form.
  • Duration of cookie: All expire when you close your browser, except ep202, which expires after 366 days.

YouTube

We embed videos from our official YouTube channel using YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode. This mode may set cookies on your computer once you click on the YouTube video player, but YouTube will not store personally-identifiable cookie information for playbacks of embedded videos using the privacy-enhanced mode. To find out more please visit YouTube’s information on embedding videos External Link.