Freedom To Operate Searching Guidelines

Is it quite common and important practice to conduct FTO search before launch a new product in market as it tells about the competitors in the market and also tells from whom license for the technology has to be taken to sell that product.  There are few things that need to be considered while conducting an FTO search. You should know in which country/region company is about to launch the product as the patent is jurisdiction specific you need to focus on only countries...

Search String types

Broad Search Strings Result sets are in wide range. Objective is to catch as many prior art as possible When narrow strings are not providing desired results.  Most Helpful When:  Researcher is not familiar with the subtleties and nuances of a patent  Researchers need to learn broader themes (classifications), keywords, and ideas for the patent study      Narrow...

steps to conduct patent search

This post demonstrates few typical steps taken in prior art search, with some steps being more or less applicable for each of the different types of searches, and every step can be further divided if needed. 1) Read disclosure/description/patent document of interest carefully and determine its novelty. 2) Extract all keywords (use dictionaries like thesaurus for assistance). 3) Create Boolean search strings using various keyword combinations while avoiding...

Patent Translations for non english patents

There is always a problem with translations in the hunt of most relevant prior art. I have dealt with the same on numerous occasions. though there are some tips which can help to get some good machine translation free of cost, as most of the time searcher only needs an idea of how invention works. JAPAN As japan is a major patent authority it is often required that Japanese patents can be machine translated though PAJ provides good and reliable machine translation but it only...

Google's updated Prior Art Search

Recently Google has added a new service to its patent search service "Prior art search".the blue button left to read this patent.This tool tries to find relevant prior art to the subject patent. It is a good value addition by google though it is still in its early stages and results are not very good but it is likely to get better. There is the screen shot that how it works. There is also a addition...

Some patent tools you must know

 Patent Library Patent Library allows users to search by patent number and get OCR'ed PDFs of patent  documents. ...

Searching prior art with the help of Inventor, assignee and Classification

Searching through the relevant keywords is safest approach for locating relevant prior art as there is a very high chance of finding prior art, but it is not the best approach. There are chances that some of the prior art may have been missed because of the different patent language or short description. There are some other strategies that a good patent searcher should work out on. some of them are to use Inventors, assignees and Classifications, first of all shortlist...

Novel approach to locate prior art

Locating close prior art provides a critical edge in patent litigation or licensing, by documenting that the patent in question should not have been granted due to anticipatory (102) or obviousness (103) art. However, the prior art defense is contingent upon successfully locating such art. as most law firms have discovered, there is a wide range of outcomes when a prior art search is commissioned. this is dramatically evident when a Joint defense Group commissions 3 searches...

SOME WORST MISTAKES IN PATENT SEARCHING

Occasionally we all mess up. When millions of dollars of patent lawsuits could be hanging in the air depending on your patent search, it’s not an ideal time to commit an error and “score on your own net.”Still, mistakes are part of life, and it’s best to be able to recognize areas in which you might be most prone to making mistakes. Are you lax when communicating with your client (internal or external)?  Identifying areas for improvement can lead to a more considerate...

why use patent classification instead of just keyword based searching?

Advantages of using IPC in comparison to only using keyword searching: Language independent Terminology / ”jargon” independent Standardized application to documents Concept search Available for (old) patent documents where no full text of claims / description is available allows for more complete search results than pure text searching Classification adds information value to patent documents Combination of classification-based and text searching gives best...