biblatex
's patent support is only rudimentary and to some extent even only illustrative of what is possible. If you need more advanced features, you will have to implement them yourself.
Specifically about location
the documentation of the @patent
type on p. 11 has
Use the type
field to specify the type and the location
field to indicate the
scope of the patent, if different from the scope implied by the type
.
So I would say that location
is usually not needed if type
(or maybe even number
) already implies the scope (US patent, UK patent, German patent, ...). There is only one example of location
with @patent
in biblatex-examples.bib
@patent{almendro,
author = {Almendro, Jos{\'e} L. and Mart{\'i}n, Jacinto and S{\'a}nchez,
Alberto and Nozal, Fernando},
title = {Elektromagnetisches Signalhorn},
number = {EU-29702195U},
date = 1998,
location = {countryfr and countryuk and countryde},
}
and that is a fake entry which does not exist, so inferences as to what exactly things should mean are risky. According to http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.text.tex/2007-01/msg00188.html and http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.text.tex/2007-01/msg00227.html the location
here was intended to show that an initially German patent was somehow extended to other countries as well. Whether or not that is common usage or important I don't know.
This post by Philipp Lehman (and the entire thread) on comp.text.tex
about the @patent
entry type are interesting for historical purposes.