Patent search tools meeting

• Jason R. Kelly: just posting my notes to the wiki, not necessarily well organized...

Patent Fields

• Think of patents as documents rather than as "rights", take an analytical approach.
• Country codes
• Name format is not standard across countries' patent systems, and sometimes not standard within the same country.
• Assignee has similar problem
  • Dupont and IBM can have about 15 different spellings for their names (IMB, Int Biz Mach, etc).
    • Additionally, DuPont has many subsidiaries so it's challenging to search for them as an entity. (m&a, etc).

• Dates
• 3 types of date-related fields:
  1. Priority number - most imp # on the patent. Number that is awarded to the doc the 1st time it's assigned anywhere in the world. The importance of this number is that any other patent doc that links to this # anywhere in the world specifies the patent family. It also specifies the date for prior art. (US system moving in line with everyone else for first-to-file)
     • Often hard to find this number in certain types of DBs
  2. Application number changes with each new submission
     • This number can be dangerous for statistics because it can create duplication.
  3. Publication number - easiest number to search on, note it takes place 14 months usually after 1st filing.
     • when you canr ead an application its already 14 months old.

Software

• VantagePoint software

Patent Databases

• [1]- largest DB on patents in the world
  • lets you look into the patent families (e.g. all the patents connected to the original priority number).
    • If you then look at the publication numbers they tell you info about the patent (e.g. A1,A2 means application 1 and application 2).
    • citing documents - patents will cite 2 types of docs (1) other patents (2) literature, other stuff. The cited documents narrow the scope of the patent, the applicant includes this because the applicant is required to provide refs to prior art, but they try to include nothing that effects their patent. the things with *'s in front are the important ones because they are added by the examiner. (for the US system anyway). XP____ means that it's from the Euro patent system.