Will you be tracked during a Prior Art Search?
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Will you be tracked during a Prior Art Search? Video Transcript
The question is will you be tracked if you do a patent search? Probably not but with the federal laws now on privacy and national security, you may well be. But the reality is for all intents and purposes, no one is watching you when you do a prior out search. You can search on the www.uspto.gov website or www.google.com/patents. At least for the purpose of your filing of a patent application, you are free to search on these free tools and find the relevant art. You only need to disclose all the relevant prior art that is material to patentability of your claims. No one is going to be tracking you when you are searching. No one is going to steal your idea if you do a search for patents. You certainly should not steal someone else's idea and claim something that has already been patented unless you have improved on that idea and then built significant new things beyond what was claimed before. If something is being sold in the marketplace today when you do a search, you find something that is used in commerce and being sold and marketed and you thought you invented it first, unfortunately you will not be able to file patent on it. So you have to disclose everything you find; otherwise, the Patent Office will probably find it themselves. They do a prior art search and they might find it and if they do find it then it could be used to invalidate your application. If you did not submit it knowingly, if the patent issues and if they find it on their own, you still have some good arguments built into your draft of an application when you actually wrote it or had the attorney write it to overcome that rejection or overcome that reference. You can not add any new information to an existing patent application. So you have to be careful that you do not file something that completely reads on the prior art.