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IPONZ New Zealand (NZ) — national
Layer national
Jurisdiction NZ (WIPO ST.3: NZ)
Issuing body Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ), a business unit of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE)
Rights administered patent, trademark, design, plant_variety, geographical_indication
Working languages English
Connector status planned (yellow — BYOK, well-documented)
Last verified 2026-05-18
Manifest entry not yet listed (planned)

Detail surveys:

Higher layers covering this office transitively:

  • NZ is NOT an EPC contracting state → no EPO OPS / INPADOC coverage for NZ national patents.
  • NZ IS a PCT member → PCT-level visibility via WIPO PATENTSCOPE; NZ national-phase detail still requires IPONZ.
  • NZ IS a Madrid member (since 2012) → IR designations of NZ via WIPO Madrid Monitor.
  • NZ is NOT a Hague member → no Hague IR design coverage of NZ.
  • NZ is NOT in the EU → no EUIPO transitive coverage (no EUTM / RCD route).
  • PVR and GI — no higher-layer substitute; IPONZ is sole source.

Rating: 🟡 Yellow — BYOK

v5 API on MBIE shared gateway at api.business.govt.nz/gateway/iponz/v5/; portal at portal.api.business.govt.nz/api/iponz. Every caller needs RealMe + MBIE subscription key + optional OAuth2 bearer. Chargeable ops require direct-debit/credit billing. IPONZ copyright statement carves the registers out of the otherwise-permissive Crown-copyright reuse grant. Jump to access details → View on the atlas →

§1 Mission

IPONZ is the sole national IP office of New Zealand — registrar for NZ national patents, trade marks, designs, plant variety rights, and geographical indications. Because NZ is not an EPC contracting state and not a Hague Agreement member, none of the regional shortcut routes (EPO OPS / INPADOC for patents, Hague for designs, EUIPO for TMs/designs) carry NZ data. Madrid Monitor covers IR designations of NZ trade marks, and PATENTSCOPE covers NZ at the PCT layer, but every NZ national-phase patent, every direct national trade-mark filing, every NZ design, all PVR, and all GI records require IPONZ as the primary surface. IPONZ also hosts the joint Trans-Tasman patent attorney register with IP Australia (an attorney-licensing register, not subject-matter data), and a voluntary "single application" co-filing concept exists with IP Australia but does not produce a unified right.

What makes IPONZ a meaningful target despite the per-user credentials: it ships the single cleanest documented per-subscriber API surface among secondary-nationals surveyed 2026-05-18 — a versioned v5 product on the MBIE shared API gateway, with published OpenAPI spec, PDF data dictionaries, and an explicit sandbox tier.

§2 What's unique here

  • NZ national patents — direct national filings and PCT national-phase entries; no EPC route, no EPO OPS substitute.
  • NZ trade marks — national filings + IR designations under Madrid; the API exposes both.
  • NZ designs — entire register; no Hague IR substitute (NZ is not in the Hague Agreement). Substantive law is the Designs Act 1953 No 65 — one of the oldest still-in-force IP statutes globally.
  • NZ plant variety rights (PVR) — UI-only on the Case Management Facility (EXTRA_pvr_qbe); not in the v5 API.
  • NZ geographical indications — static register page; not in the v5 API. Includes the NZ wine PGI register.
  • NZ patent file documents — only via the IPONZ document- retrieval SOAP operation (Base64-encoded payload), not in any upstream layer.
  • Joint Trans-Tasman patent attorney register with IP Australia (ttipattorney.gov.au).

§3 Programmatic surfaces

IPONZ API v5 (MBIE shared API gateway)

Field Value
Endpoint (prod) https://api.business.govt.nz/gateway/iponz/v5/
Endpoint (sandbox) https://api.business.govt.nz/sandbox/iponz/…
Developer portal portal.api.business.govt.nz/api/iponz
Auth RealMe login → MBIE subscription key + optional OAuth2 bearer; chargeable operations require a registered IPONZ user with direct-debit/credit billing
Format REST + JSON (search, renewals, public-data); SOAP + XML (document retrieval, application submit, correspondence)
Rate limit per-subscription quota in portal (Azure APIM); /trademarksearch capped at 2,000 hits per call
ToS posture per-subscriber API use free for registered IPONZ users; register data carved out of Crown-copyright re-use grant (copyright statement)
Rating (zero-infra proxy) 🟡 Yellow — BYOK
Primary source IPONZ API page → portal entry

Documented v5 surface covers patents, trade marks, and designs. The data-dictionary PDFs on the portal list the field inventory for each: Patent Information, Trade Mark Information, Design Information, Submit Trade Mark, Submit Patent. Why yellow rather than green: there is no anonymous public-search tier — every caller needs their own RealMe + IPONZ subscription key. Clean, but the per-user posture rules out a single-credential hosted proxy.

Case Management Facility (consumer search UI)

Field Value
Endpoint app.iponz.govt.nz/app/Extra/Default.aspx?op=…
Auth session cookies; RealMe for logged-in flows
Format ASP.NET HTML (302 → Qbe.aspx?sid=…)
Rating 🔴 Red — HTML SPA; Imperva WAF actively defends against scraping; the v5 API is the better target for patents / TMs / designs
Primary source linked from IPONZ home navigation

Carries five route groups: EXTRA_pt_qbe (patents), EXTRA_tm_qbe (trade marks), EXTRA_ds_qbe (designs), EXTRA_pvr_qbe (plant variety rights), EXTRA_Activity_qbe (Online Journal). PVR has no v5 API equivalent — it lives only here. GI is similar.

IPONZ dataset on catalogue.data.govt.nz

Field Value
Endpoint catalogue.data.govt.nz/dataset/iponz
Auth none
Format dataset metadata points back to the API as access path; statistical exports ("application volumes since 2014")
Rating 🔴 Red against zero-infra proxy — pointer record, not a register data feed
Primary source NZ open-data catalogue

Confirms no bulk register feed exists. The dataset record advertises the API as the access path. The CKAN catalogue itself sits behind a Distil bot challenge so direct CKAN-API search needs a real User-Agent and session cookies.

WIPO IP API Catalog

Field Value
Endpoint apicatalog.wipo.int
Result 0 IPONZ entries as of 2026-05-18 probe (179 total across DPMA, EPO, EUIPO, IP Australia, JPO, MOIP KOREA, QAZ, UPRP, USPTO, WIPO)
Rating informational — confirms IPONZ has not (yet) self-registered against the canonical inventory, despite running a documented API

§4 Fees

Policy: link only.

IPONZ publishes fee schedules (in NZD; GST 15% additionally where the requester is in NZ) covering patents (filing, examination, maintenance, acceptance, renewals), trade marks (per class application, renewal, opposition), designs (filing, renewal), plant variety rights, and miscellaneous services (file inspection, certified copies). Statutory basis sits in the three primary Acts: the Patents Act 2013 No 68, the Trade Marks Act 2002 No 49, and the still-current Designs Act 1953 No 65, each with implementing regulations setting the fee tables.

Notable discount programmes (name only — no amounts or dates per policy):

  • PCT national-phase rate — reduced filing fee applies when entering NZ from a PCT international application, per IPONZ's patent-fees page.
  • API access free for registered IPONZ users — there is no fee for use of the API (statutory transaction fees still apply).

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

  • Madrid IRs designating NZ — transitively via planned WIPO Madrid Monitor connector.
  • NZ at the PCT layer — transitively via planned WIPO PATENTSCOPE coverage.
  • Trans-Tasman attorney register data — out of scope for subject-matter IP coverage.
  • Nothing direct — IPONZ has no shipped connector and IP Australia coverage does not cross the Tasman.

What we should add (planned — yellow, BYOK)

  • patent_client_agents.iponz — env-gated BYOK connector against the MBIE-gateway v5 surface. Pattern: mirror the shipped ip_australia_* template. Initial scope:
  • iponz_common — shared MBIE-gateway scaffold (subscription key + optional OAuth2 bearer; sandbox vs prod base URL toggle).
  • iponz_patents — POST /patentsearch, case-number lookup, "updated since" delta sync, document retrieval (SOAP).
  • iponz_trademarks — POST /trademarksearch (≤2,000 hits), case lookup, delta sync. Carries both national and IR designations.
  • iponz_designs — analogous search + lookup + retrieval.
  • Env gates: IPONZ_SUBSCRIPTION_KEY + optional IPONZ_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID / IPONZ_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET.

Closes the entire NZ patent / TM / design coverage gap. The unique value: there is no upstream substitute for NZ patents (no EPC route), and no Hague substitute for NZ designs. Madrid only covers the IR-designation slice of TMs.

What we should NOT add (and why)

  • Case Management Facility (app.iponz.govt.nz) HTML scrape. ASP.NET session-bound, Imperva-defended, ToS personal-use carve- out; the v5 API is the better target.
  • PVR / GI connector — yet. No documented API surface. PVR is CMF-UI-only (EXTRA_pvr_qbe); GI is a static register page. Strategic memory: revisit only if IPONZ extends the v5 API to cover PVR or GI, or if a separate documented feed appears.
  • catalogue.data.govt.nz dataset scrape. The dataset advertises the API as the access path; no parallel bulk feed exists. Distil bot defence on the CKAN host makes scraping hostile.
  • Sharing infra with the ip_australia_* connectors. Despite Trans-Tasman branding, the two offices run independent developer platforms — IPONZ on MBIE Azure APIM (api.business.govt.nz), IP Australia on a separate OAuth2 server (portal.api.ipaustralia.gov.au) fronting api.business.gov.au. No credential reuse; separate connectors.

Next steps

  1. Subscribe to the IPONZ API Product under a project RealMe identity to obtain a sandbox subscription key. The MBIE API support team may request "further information" before approval — be transparent that this is for a hosted research-tooling layer with end-users supplying their own future credentials.
  2. Download the v5 OpenAPI spec + data-dictionary PDFs from the portal once subscribed, and persist them in research/openapi/iponz-v5.json (or the equivalent).
  3. Probe the sandbox end-to-end on patent / TM / design search
  4. case lookup + delta-sync + document retrieval, confirming actual quota and pagination behaviour.
  5. Write specs/nz-iponz-connector-spec.md following the ip_australia_* template — env-gated tools, sandbox/prod toggle, shared iponz_common scaffold, polite caching (5 min for status, 24 h for record bodies), retry on Azure APIM 429s.
  6. Open question to clarify with IPONZ support — whether a "public-data-only" subscription tier exists that we can offer to end-users without the direct-debit billing requirement (chargeable operations would be out of scope for the proxy).

§6 Known unknowns

  • Anonymous "public search" tier. Does any path exist to call the v5 patent/TM/design search operations without a direct-debit billing arrangement? The IPONZ landing page is clear about charged-operation gating but ambiguous about read-only access. Worth asking helpdesk@mail.api.business.govt.nz.
  • OAuth2 vs subscription-key floor. Is the OAuth2 bearer strictly optional, or required for certain operations (renewals / submissions)? Portal docs say "optionally"; sandbox testing would confirm.
  • Pagination mechanics. TM search caps at 2,000 hits — what is the cursor/offset convention for deltas exceeding that?
  • PVR API surface. Does an undocumented PVR endpoint exist in the v5 product, or is PVR truly UI-only? Worth asking IPONZ.
  • GI register format. The static register page hints at a small enumerable list (NZ wine PGIs primarily); is there a downloadable canonical list separate from the page HTML?
  • Single Application Process — current state. Is the AU-NZ voluntary co-filing path actually live in production via the v5 IPONZ API and the IP Australia API in 2026? AJ Park's 2026 writeup is sceptical; an authoritative MBIE / IPA confirmation would close the question.
  • Bot-defence posture under sustained load. The Imperva / Distil layer is friendly to authenticated subscription-key traffic, but production-pattern throttle is unconfirmed.

§7 References

Primary sources only — iponz.govt.nz, mbie.govt.nz, api.business.govt.nz, legislation.govt.nz, pctlegal.wipo.int, apicatalog.wipo.int, data.govt.nz.

API + developer documentation:

Substantive law (NZ statutes via legislation.govt.nz):

Fees:

Legal terms + reuse:

Trans-Tasman context:

Cross-office context:

Detail surveys + waves:

Last updated 2026-05-18.