Skip to main content

In Search of Prior Art



What is “prior art” and why am I looking for it?  To be granted a patent the invention in question must be “novel”, that is it must be new. Prior art is, at its most basic, any description of the invention published prior to applying for a patent. The revelation of prior art would defeat the application for a patent or render a patent invalid.  Searching for prior art, or patent searching, is not an easy thing to do; the patent classification system is not intuitive and it must be remembered that the kinds of things you are searching for are often described in highly technical language and the search may require going beyond previously filed patents.  

As I said, patent searching is hard and searchers don’t always discover the existence of prior art. Add to this the fact that in patent litigation there is a lot of money at stake so the discovery of prior art is a very valuable thing. In an attempt to overcome the difficulty of searching a company named Article One Partners has a unique method of searching for prior art. Rather than hiring a traditional patent search firm, Article One Partners, relying on the wisdom of crowds, invites amateurs to search for prior art and rewards successful searchers with money. This Slate article discusses the company and how one of their most successful searchers has earned over $75,000 working from home searching for prior art. 

The entire process of patent searching is about to undergo a tremendous change. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has joined with the European Patent Office (EPO) to create a unified patent classification system called the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) system.  The new merged system, set to take effect on January 1, 2013 and is based on the International Patent Classification (IPC) system.  It is interesting to note that the US system has not been kept up to date, but with this harmonization plan, the joint system will be not only up to date, but will allow accessibility to US patent records back to 1920.

Comments

  1. i personally think this merging of classification systems has been a great help .searching prior art in both these areas has become easier now. in my 7 years of working with IP, this has been a majorly posoitive step.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.