PATENT PRIOR ART SEARCH AND TRADEMARK SEARCH

PATENT AND TRADEMARK

Patent – an intellectual property granted to an inventor of any new, useful, non – obvious idea by the government

Trademark – an exclusive sign, expression or design identifying a particular product or service

PATENT PRIOR ART SEARCH

Prior art – all information in any form related to a patent’s claim of originality that has been made available to the public before a given date

Also called state-of-the-art conducted to ensure the invention is

‘new’ and ‘non-obvious’ important step in patent granting

procedure

BENEFITS

makes the inventor aware about any pre-existing knowledge closely related to his invention

gives him an insight about the kind of research already done in that field.

TYPES OF PRIOR ART SEARCHES

novelty search: conducted by professionals before a patent application is filed for, ensures the ‘ newness’ of the invention by searching into patent databases, utility models and scientific literature.

Validity search: conducted after a patent is issued, to declare a patent invalid if the patent examiner overlooked any information during the prior art search

Clearance search: to check if an issued patent violates an existing patent and if so, a validity search is conducted again.

CROWDSOURCING

Popular method of prior art search where references are difficult to find.

interested people form a forum on an online platform and conduct the search.

TRADEMARK SEARCH

Carried out through databases of registered trademarks maintained by governments

Search reports interpreted by licensed attorneys

by third party databases like LexisNexis, Dialog, Compu-Mark

Also by private databases and classification systems like the Vienna Classification