US Patent Search - TMP Patent Lesson 12 | India Trademarks

PATENT SEARCH

Why should you Conduct Patent Search?

To ascertain if your invention is Novel.
To ascertain if your invention is not obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art?
To identify prior art that teaches away from your inventive concept and wise them as prior art so that you can convince the office that your invention is not obvious.
To know the state of the art is your field
To see how prior art has described the key features or elements of your invention.
To design around prior art so that your invention is both novel and obvious.
To determine if your invention will infringe any patents that are in force
To obtain commercial information about your competitors
To identify leading inventors and applicants in the field worldwide
To understand how to draft your patent application easily.

To understand how to describe your inventive concept and the key Features of your invention in your patent application, try studying
To identify if you can get a patent or not.
To enable you to convince and potent ional investors for the reasons said above that they must take a licensing agreement from your or invest in commercializing your invention.
To avoid needless expenditure and work if the invention you made is already disclosed in prior art.
To make improvements over the state of the art

WHEN NOT TO CONDUCT A PATENT SEARCH

If you follow all publications and published patent applications in Your field and rectify to your invention
If you operate in an area which is totally new in the world
When you have made patent search already, identified the state of the art and then made an improvement can it and your study covered the improvement made also generally avoid not conducting a patent search once in a form if you are into R&D or working in R &D, especially in a pharma company

PLACE TO CONDUCT PATENT SEARCH ON LINE

Patent search can be conducted online free of charge in

www.uspto.go/patent
google.com/patents
ep.espatent.com
surtip.com
wipo.int for PCT applications
freepatetsonline.com
Jpo for English abstracts of Japan but EPO will also cover if

Paid databases

STN

SCIFINDER

DELPHION

MICROPATENT

QUESTEL-ORBIT

DIALOG

LEXIS

WESTLAW

Patent Café

PATENT CASE LAW SEARCH FOR ATTRONEYS

FREE DATABASE

Findlaw.com

Paid Databases:

Lexis_com ()

Westlaw.com () - FOR US CASES

Loislaw.com ()

Versuslaw.com ()

Manupatra.com ()

indlaw.com () For UK & INDIA CASES

WHERE TO CONDUCT LITERATURE SEARCH

Many Databases provide technical journal information. Depends on the specialized field. About 200 of them are available but as discussed earlier India Patent office does not have the capability to search for prior art technical literature is paid databases.

HOW TO CONDUCT PATENT SEARCH IN USPTO ONLINE

USPTO is the most robust & flexible Patent search engine available freely with the possible exception of Go ogle Patents. There are certain advantages over Google Patents as USPTO interface allows you to write search queries in a very targeted way

If you go to www.uspto.gov,click on patents and then in the drop down menu click on patent search. The resulting window is www.uspto.gov/patft. Make this window a favorite in your browser

If you look at www.uspto.gov/patft you will find on your left hand side a green color half. This enables you search issued patents in USPTO. In other words if you select the links on the green side you will be searching only issued patents or patents already granted by USPTO.

The one on the right side enables you to search published applications. If you file a Utility patent application in US, it will be published after 18 months from the priority date. The date here is the date of the published applications.

You can conduct a search in USPTO website only in one of these databases at one time

You can use Google Patents or Freepatentsonline.com to conduct searches of both issued patents and published applications in US at the same time.

USPTO allows you to conduct three types of searches

They are

Number search
Quick Search
Advanced Search

1. Number Search

Patents granted by USPTO have a seven digit number like 6,789,123 or 5,678,912 etc. Note that you should not use the prefix US while searching in USPTO. This database contains only US patents & US Patent applications and if you put the prefix US it will return zero documents. This is not the fault of the server but due to your mistake in writing the query. You must give the correct number format while searching for applications and note that various databases add one or more zeros to make their results distinctive and if you use this in USPTO database for number searching you may get errors.

I give below some screen shots to make this easy for you.

Let us go to www.uspto.gov/patft and click on the number search link on the left hand menu

The link that I reached is http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm and the screen looks like this

Now I’m going to search for US Issued Patent No. 5656789. See how I’m entering the number below

There is no US prefix for this search query. This is important for many of you make the mistake of putting US before the number and do not get any result and feel confused.

See the resulting screen below after I click search. See this is very, very simple

Now Let us conduct a search in Published Applications.

What do we do?

Go to www.uspto.gov/patft

Go to the screen on your right hand side

Click on Publication Number Search

The resulting URL is http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html

The resulting screen looks like this

In this screen you should enter the Year of Publication in four digits followed by seven number digits.

For example, if you are looking for the publication number 2003/56789 you should put 2003 year followed by two zeros followed by the number and the correct format is 20030056789

Let us search for this number. See the screen shot below.

If you click on Search now, you will get this screen with a link pointing to the document. See below

You just need to click on the link to go to the document.

Also if you want to search for documents which are pre 1976 you can search only by using the number of the document or by searching for the specific US Classification code.

Note that Number searching is useful only when you want to search for get a particular published document whose number is already known to you. It is not to be used otherwise

This is the most elementary form of search on USPTO website. Please try to remember that the patent number is a seven digit number and when searching for applications you have to put the year first and followed by the seven digit number of the document.

Also note that USPTO has three different numbers

Application Number which is not the publication Number. What I have given you above is for searching using only the publication number.

Publication Number

Issued Patent Number

In number search you should use only the publication number and the patent number.

Please see the help link for the number searches below

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/help/helpnum.html

http://www.uspto.gov/patft/help/helpnum.htm

When you conduct patent searches over a period of time, all this will become second nature to you and these are very simple things to do.

I will give you lessons on Quick Search in the next lesson

[?]