Be careful not to waste your money when applying for a patent. It is essential that you conduct a patent search prior to submitting an application. In a nutshell, the advice is don’t spend your money until you are fairly certain that your invention is novel. You will not be entitled to patent any technology that is already generally known.
Steps
- You will want to search for both published applications and issued patents to see if others have tried to patent your idea. This may be done, for example, at the US Patent Search Facility.
- For both issued patents and published patent applications, enter the terms or keywords that will likely fit your invention. The keywords can be multiple words.
- Search initially in claims and/or abstract. This prevents you from getting a large number of results that are not relevant.
- When you find a patent that is relevant to your idea, then write the patent number down.
- Do specific searches for all aspects of your idea. In other words, separate your ideas into as many parts as possible and search for each of those parts.
- Make a decision on the patentablity of your invention based on the closeness of the patents in your search to your idea.
Tips
- Even if you are planning on having a professional search done, it may well be worthwhile to do a preliminary search yourself. It may change your perspective of your idea. It may even spark new innovations that will enhance your idea.
- PDF versions of the published US patent applications and issued US patents may be obtained from http://www.patentretriever.com/.
- PDF versions of the published US patent applications and issued US patents may be obtained from http://www.pat2pdf.org/.
- Patent examiners are generally trained to search according to the classification of an invention. Thus, it may make sense by classification as well.
Warnings
- Professional searches are only as good as your instructions and the skills of the searcher.
- Patentability searches are quite different from freedom-to-operate searches. Do not confuse the two.
