General Patent Information
A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a country to an individual (or their assignee) for a defined period of time in exchange for disclosing the invention. The exclusive rights provide the patent owner with the ability to prevent others from making, using, or selling the claimed invention. Patents can be bought, sold, and licensed.
Types of Patent Searches: there are numerous reasons one might conduct a patent search. Provided below are several types of searches and purpose of each search.
- Novelty Search: a search to determine if an invention is unique and novel before time and money are spent to file for and obtain a patent.
- Infringement or Clearance Search: a search to determine if a planned product or service might infringe another's patent and, therefore, run the risk of a patent infringement claim or suit.
- Validity Search: a search to determine if there are any patents or other prior art which can be used to determine or assess the validity of patent (i.e. can a patent be invalidated because someone taught, disclosed, or patented the idea first).
- State of the Art Search: a search to provide the most recent patents and applications related to a certain topic or field as a means of technology research.
Quick Search
Quick search provides a search tool which provides a drop down menu for searching keywords, terms or other information against the most common search fields. A search can be conducted using more than one field at a time by additing additional field boxes through use of the "And/Or" conjunction box. You can use wildcards to your Quick Search.
Expert Search
Expert search enables you to create advanced and complex queries using field abbreviations. Expert Search employs the use of boolean operators, nesting and wildcards in your expert search query. In both quick search and expert search, the collection searched is defaulted to US patents. To change the collection searched, just select the required collection from the collection options provided.
Boolean Operators
Boolean operators are used to combine multiple field searches or to combine multiple words or phrases. Patents.com Boolean Operators include the AND, OR and NOT operators.
| Boolean Operator |
Example |
Function |
| AND |
Laser AND Diode |
Finds documents which have both "laser" AND "diode". |
| OR |
Laser OR Diode |
Finds documents which have either "laser" OR "diode" or both. |
| NOT |
Laser NOT Diode |
Finds documents which have only "laser" and will exclude all documents with word "diode". |