{"id":971,"date":"2014-10-09T13:17:23","date_gmt":"2014-10-09T13:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/?p=971"},"modified":"2014-10-03T13:18:50","modified_gmt":"2014-10-03T13:18:50","slug":"the-search-is-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/2014\/10\/09\/the-search-is-on\/","title":{"rendered":"The search is on"},"content":{"rendered":"

A post from our student blogger Megan<\/em><\/p>\n

You probably haven\u2019t thought about how many patents there are floating around out there but in all honesty, there is virtually a whole sea of them.\u00a0 Patents and published patent applications are considered \u201cprior art,\u201d or all the information that is already available to the public that may impact the uniqueness of a prospective patent.\u00a0 Prior art plays a large role in whether someone is entitled to a patent and it must be thoroughly vetted before a patent can ever be granted.\u00a0 There is, however, a lot of it to wade through.\u00a0 The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted a total of 302,948 patents last year\u2014an all-time high.\u00a0 But the United States government has been awarding patents since 1790 when Samuel Hopkins received the first grant on potash, a component used to make fertilizer.\u00a0 Currently, the USPTO is issuing patents in the 8,000,000 range.\u00a0 However, the USPTO did not start counting patents until July 13, 1836.\u00a0 This means that there are 9,957 more patents that need to be accounted for that were issued before the USPTO started keeping records.<\/p>\n

United States patents are only a portion of the patents that exist worldwide, though.\u00a0 Espacenet, a website generated by the European Patent Office (EPO), boasts that you can research their databases for over 80,000,000 patent document records kept since 1836.\u00a0 Additionally, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), offers Patentscope, an even more comprehensive search database that covers patent documents from ninety countries.\u00a0 Granted, these documents are mostly patent applications, and you must note that patents have expiration dates, so you can bet that the majority of the patents you encounter on these databases are likely out of date.\u00a0 But all of these documents represent ideas that someone thought important enough to request legal patent protection.\u00a0 Furthermore, they are important to anyone who seeks patent protection due to the laws that prospective applicants must abide by.<\/p>\n

Title 35 of the United States Code Section 102(a) states that, among other things, a person may not be entitled to a patent if the invention was \u201cpatented [or] described in a printed publication\u2026\u201d This means that if your inventive concept has already been \u201canticipated,\u201d or previously patented or published in a patent application anywhere in the world, you cannot receive patent protection on that particular invention.\u00a0 Now, there are exceptions to this rule, but the main focus is to find all of these previously issued patents or publications that may preempt your patent so you can adequately inspect them first.\u00a0 This process is called patent searching.\u00a0 While a patent search is not required to file a patent application, it is highly recommended.<\/p>\n

For the past six weeks, students in the MSPL program at the University of Notre Dame have been studying prior art exploration methods in their patent searching class.\u00a0 The sheer number of patents and patent documents seem like a daunting prospect when you are up against a massive sea of prior art awash in the World Wide Web.\u00a0 There are specific steps to strategically search for relevant patents and publications, though. \u00a0The first step to any search is to develop search terms.\u00a0 Think about the invention and narrow down words that truly describe what it constitutes.\u00a0 From there, draft a \u201cbuilding block\u201d strategy of synonymous terms.\u00a0 For example, if the new invention involves a method of three-dimensional cancer diagnosis, your original search terms may include those three words.\u00a0 Build on these words by choosing synonyms that match these meanings for a more expansive search.\u00a0 Cancer could be substituted with the word \u201ctumor,\u201d \u201cthree-dimensional\u201d could also mean \u201cmultidimensional,\u201d and \u201cdiagnosis\u201d could be replaced with the word \u201canalysis.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next step is to run an actual search on the terms you have developed.\u00a0 There are a multitude of electronic databases that searchers use to dig up relevant documents.\u00a0 Besides Espacenet and Patentscope, there are domestic databases that aid in searches as well.\u00a0 The USPTO website is dedicated to searches for United States patents and applications.\u00a0 Moreover, Google Patents is a quick, free search engine geared towards the general public.\u00a0 One can google a patent number, title, or general concept and pull hundreds of patents in seconds from this database.\u00a0 Once the searcher finds relevant patents and published documents relating to the new inventive concept it is his or her duty to examine these and decipher whether they would prevent the inventor from receiving a patent.<\/p>\n

This is a general overview of patent searching\u2014patent searching is not quick or easy, though.\u00a0 There are professional searchers that have made a career out of searching for prior art patents.\u00a0 The reward is in crafting a search the edges close to the new technology that you are searching, but is still different enough in scope that the new concept remains novel.\u00a0 So while the amount of prior patents and documents may be vast, there is no need to fear diving into the prior art pool:\u00a0 formulate a search strategy and jump in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A post from our student blogger Megan You probably haven\u2019t thought about how many patents there are floating around out there but in all honesty, there is virtually a whole sea of them.\u00a0 Patents and published patent applications are considered … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":649,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29602],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-student-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/649"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":972,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions\/972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/patentlaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}