Patent Search or Prior Art Search is the most necessary skill that beginning Patent Agents and Patent Analysts need to find out.
These searches are conducted in two kinds of databases.
1 is a list of Zero cost Patent Databases and the other is far more expensive Paid Databases. The principles of Patent Search remains the same although the techniques of doing the patent search will vary from database to database.
Now we do a Prior Art Search to ascertain many issues. But ahead of going it to it you want to know the definition of Invention and how an invention is determined to be patentable or otherwise.
What is an Invention?
An invention is a Item or Approach that is New, have inventive step or in other words remain non-obvious to a skilled individual and is capable of industrial application.
Is the invention patentable? To be Patentable an invention have to meet the Test of Novelty, Inventive step over prior art and be capable of Industrial application.
Novelty Test
This determines if the invention is New. As basic as that.
Frequently International Examination of Patents take that Novelty is present if all the claimed attributes of the invention are not disclosed in a single Prior art document. In other words an improvement more than an current invention will meet the Novelty test for no single document will show all the attributes of the improved invention which includes the original document or patent that taught the invention or inventive concept.
Inventive Step Test
Inventive step is generally entails that the proposed invention must have at least improvement over existing state of the art and that improvement ought to not be apparent to a person skilled in the art. Now these are two requirements. 1 is that there must be technical advance or significant improvement in the technology invented and secondly such an invention need to not be apparent to a person skilled in that distinct Art. The initially of these two specifications is bit uncomplicated to comprehend but the second requirement is tough. The second requirement presupposes two issues. That there is a individual of ordinary skill in the Art and that such a individual ought to not really feel that the proposed invention is apparent to him in the light of the prior art.
Now the confusing factor is who is the Person of Ordinary skill in the Art?
There is no such actual or ex individual as Individual of Ordinary Skill in the art. No 1 is designated as such by the patent workplace for the purposes of determination of patentability in a common way.
A person of ordinary skill is a legalistic assumption. He is a individual who reads all things that are published in the subject matter and knows almost everything relating to the topic matter. So he is considered a domain professional. But this domain professional has only the skill level at an ordinary level. So basically a Individual Of Ordinary skill is a individual who knows all, reads all but has not invented anything or need to have not be a recognized scientist and have to have not have achieved something in the topic matter. But he knows just about every factor in the topic and has full analytical abilities. So effectively a Person of Ordinary Skill is nothing but the Examiner of Patents who handles your patent application. Now having realized this we have to have to recognize how the test of non-obviousness is determined. This is the most troublesome part to meet in patent-capacity. If the examiner feels that the inventive step is established, you are likely to get a patent. It not your application is going to be refused. It is as very simple as that.
Patent Examiners ascertain Non Obviousness or Inventive Step by listing out the key capabilities of the claimed invention first with respect to the priority date of the patent application.
The priority date of the patent application is the date on which it is initially filed for patent protection in any patent office anywhere in the globe. To claim the benefit of priority date in other countries the patent application need to be filed within 12 months of the priority date if it is filed as a convention application or within 30 (or in some instances 31) months from the Priority Date if it is filed as a Patent Co-operation Treaty National Phase Application in other nations.
Let us say that the Invention as claimed has 5 key attributes 1, two, three, four and five.
Please note my words Invention as claimed and this means that only the claims made in the patent application will be examined for patent-ability by the Examiners and not the specification and other parts of the patent application. The other parts of the patent application should deliver antecedent support to the claims. But the examination is accomplished only for the claims.
Now the examiner will list out documents that teach or disclose the every single one of the key attributes 1, two, three, 4 or 5.
A prior art document have to have not teach all the important capabilities or even way more than 1 key feature. It is enough if it teaches or discloses or technically speaking anticipates just one of the important characteristics. If the examiner is able to obtain prior art documents either from patent applications published earlier than the priority date of your patent application or technical journal articles published prior to priority date, for all the key characteristics of the invention as explained above, he will combine the prior Art document A that teaches key feature 1, Document B that teaches key feature 2, Document C that teaches key feature 3, Document D that teaches important feature four and Document E that disclosed important feature five. Then by combining all these documents A+B+C+D+E the Patent Examiner will reject your application saying that the invention as claimed lacks inventive step, is apparent to a individual of ordinary skill in the art when all the references are combined as stated above and for that reason is not patentable.
Fascinating! Ah..Irritating!! No Dilemma. This is the fact of life that must be realized and accepted as a reality.
Nothing can be carried out about it.
But this is how Patent Applications are examined and granted all more than the world and this is the procedure of examination of patent applications..
Now there are two points here.
By amending your claims or by appropriately drafting your claims, you can assure that the Patent Examiner will not say that it lacks inventive step and you can get a patent.
O.k
But how do you know that your invention is going to be granted a patent? How do you draft the claims so that the examiner can't object as explained earlier?
This is exactly where the skill sets in Patent Search or Prior Art Search comes in to Play.
If you find out how to do a Prior Art Search and what are the principles of performing that search and how a Patent Examiner will do that search to determine and grant or refuse a patent, you will be in a position to decide if the invention is patentable or not. You understand to think like a Patent Examiner and examine like a Patent Examiner.
And then you can stay clear of a lot of expenditures in filing and obtaining patents or in generating an investment call to make an investment to invest in a analysis and development method for inventing an invention.
You can also establish whether the invention if manufactured and marketed will result in the commission of the offense of Patent Infringement of any existing Patent and in what nations such infringement will happen and in what countries it will not happen and so you are absolutely free to market the invention there. It will also teach you as to what are the nations you can safely manufacture and marketplace a item which is protected by an existing patent in one country but not in other nations..So if you want to copy and manufacture the most recent invention you will need to set up manufacturing units in one country where the patent owner has not obtained protection and can sell them only in those nations exactly where the Patent owner has not cared to defend his invention.
So a lot of organization possibilities are present here for the reason that just about every year about 500,000 patent applications are filed all more than the globe. About fifty per cent of them are not granted in the very first location. And those patent applications that are granted are not protected in all the nations. So you are zero cost to copy, manufacture and market place them if you comprehend what can be performed and where it can be done. Of course you want to have the capital and the know how for this.
This is the significance of doing or studying to do Patent Searches or Prior Art Searches. In my subsequent write-up I will talk about the many No cost Patent Databases available to do Patent Searches and I will proceed in future articles about the methodologies of performing Patent Search in a number of patent databases.
In short, the Court tightened up the standards for proving inequitable conduct in a patent case. .jpg;)
A patent database and search portal was used which covers 90 different patent authorities worldwide, including 20 countries which provide full-text file search as well as legal status information. We also identified patent classes to search in order to ensure that relevant results would not be omitted. Lastly, a set of assignees of over 100+ companies who have currently or previously produced wind turbine technology / components was searched.
The patent was number 174,465 issued in 1876. It was patent number 6,469. 
