How to do a prior art search?
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How to do a prior art search? Video Transcript
I am going to talk you about in this section how you do prior art search. You can do a prior art search a number of ways using online tools. The USPTO website allows you to search issued patents and pending applications that have been published by the USPTO. Generally, applications that were filed after 2001, that have been filed 18 months ago or older, become published by the USPTO in most cases unless the applicant had requested non-publication of an application. All issued patents do become published. So you can search the USPTO website and look for issued patents and granted patents and pending applications there. You could also search on Google. www.google.com/patent lets you do a pretty comprehensive search of pending applications and issued patents as well. You could hire professional searcher who would basically look for key words and do Boolean searches using advance searching tools including Delphion, LexisNexis and other paid services to let professionals do searches of patents that are in both the United States and in foreign countries. The European Patent Office has a good website as well for doing patent searches as do many countries which have electronic access to their patent records. The importance of doing a prior art search varies. Sometimes you want to pick your battle well and if you are small inventor, you want to make sure you are picking your battle well so you know that what you are going to spend money on protecting and filing patents on are the most valuable things that are not ready done. You might want to increase your chances of getting a patent issued and getting it through the Patent Office by doing a search. There are multiple reasons why you might. You might also do it if you are challenging the validity of another patent to see whether or not you could find something else that is prior art reference. Usually that can occur during a litigation process, for example, or in a licensing negotiation. It is very important to review the search results. It is very hard to do an exact search. No invention, in most cases, is exactly like something else. It might be 90% like something else or 95% like something else and people use different words to say that same things. The differences in those words might have significant meaning which alters the context and potential applicability of a set of claims. So it is very important to understand that there is a lot of grey area when doing prior art searching, and so often patent attorney tell applicants not to do a search. But there is a legal duty to disclose all known prior art. So depending on what your goals are, if you are looking to save money to pick your battles well, you might do a search but you need to keep track of the things that you find and make sure those things get submitted as a prior art reference. Otherwise, there is no real need to do it in the normal context before you file an application. You might want to do it afterwards to make sure the Patent Office is aware of the closest prior art and you help along the process by submitting it proactively to the Patent Office.