How to search for a patent?
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How to search for a patent? Video Transcript
So I am going to talk about what you can do and how to search for a patent now. We have gotten beyond whether we search or not. But what is the best way to search? There are different things you can use to find the closest prior art to a particular patent. If the patent is already issued, it probably has a class and a subclass printed on the front of the patent. So you can search by that class or subclass and basically the Patent Office is divided into art units and each art unit looks at a specific kind of patent application and issues only certain kinds of patents based on the technology area. So if you search by the class and subclass using a filtered search, using www.google.com/patents or the USPTO website, you could find the relevant patents that are in that group. The other way is to look at the terms of the claims or the key terms of the claims that might be used as a basis of searching. You look for generic words, central concepts that you could search on. You could do Boolean searches on many sites doing an and/or function to see whether both words are in an application or not together. You can also search by the title of the patent. The title of the patent often indicates something about the invention that is usually a little broader than an independent claim. But finding other patents that have the same titles is a quick way to search, though the title not always is helpful in seeing how close the patent is. Also when you search, look at figures. Look at your figures and someone else's figures. Do not read a patent end to end. Do not look at the first page and the end page. The way I look at patent applications or issued patents when looking for prior art, is to look at the figures. Good figures tell a story of an invention to a federal jury. Do the figures here help explain the concept? If they do, you could learn a lot by looking at the figures. So look at the figures for clues as to what might be sections of the detailed descriptions that you might want to read later. So you find some patent that is useful to look at based on the figures, look at the figure, see if it looks like something that you are trying to find prior art for and read only the paragraph that is relevant to that figure in the detailed description. Another good thing to do, at least as a preliminary pass, is to look at the background. Is the problem that that particular prior art reference is solving or looking to solve the same kind of problem that your invention that you are trying to do a prior art search for trying to solve? That can also give you a clue. The key is to find passages or figures or specification areas that match your particular inventive concepts in your claims. So you want to take your claim terms and you want to match them against potential figures that exist in the prior art that reflect that inventive concept. Look at the background as well of that prior art reference and see if it is the same kind of problem you are trying to solve. There are certain ways that you can look for prior art. You could also look at the official Patent Office Gazette that prints out every Tuesday and see if it has any patents but that is going to be big, manual task, for the latest patents. Every Tuesday, the patent office publishes its latest patents and some people subscribe to the Patent Office Gazette to stay abreast of the latest patents. If you want to order patents, there is a lot of services where you can order copies and on www.google.com/patents. I believe now you can download PDF files as well. There is another good website to download PDF copies of patents that you know of by number – it is www.pat2pdf.org. It's a free website.