man you put some work into this. thanks
by the way nice looking bunch of quads

Great info Todd. Thanks!

Hi Robert,
Me, my wife and two boys at Bayfield WI last summer (Valhalla Trail Lodge) great time. I learned alot of these search tricks on other forums over the years. I’m reading alot of these message about how much everything cost, and I thought maybe I can help some people on cost at the front end of this adventure by sharing what I’ve learned.
Your welcome Margret, if you have any questions on any steps, I can post back with my best answer.
Todd

todd
in your opinion how much water does a patent hold these days when you are trying to get around it by tweaking it a little to be different?

Thank you Todd, this is so helpful information!

Robert
I can tell you this for sure. The way patent examiners think is alot different now then 5 years ago. I remember a 20/20 show about 5+ years ago where attourny’s were betting each other that they could get any patent through the patent office, and did. You’ve probably heard of the massive hiring of patent examiners at the USPTO there way over loaded. Here’s an exsample, If you look up Joan lunden’s patent application on the PAIR system, and follow the image file wrapper (she’s has finally been added to the patent by the way). In the past that patent would have moved right through. Her Patent attourny is forced to use every trick in the book, and it doesn’t seem to be working (will see). She selling alot of product on QVC, I hope they win there patent.

Hi again Robert,
First I asked an exsaminer how often they let the tweaking patents go through. He said It’s totally there discretion, because he said mechanical idea’s are pretty predictable. A bolt is only going to do so many different operations. He did say for example, One latch may be beneficial over another, so they will allow the patent through because of the benefit’s of the new latch. Now lets say you won the tweaking patent your talking about. Here’s where the buck stops. If some one takes you to court for infringement. Neither the examiner, attorney/agent are responsible for allowing the tweaking patent to go through. Just you and or the company selling it.
Todd

todd
in your opinion how much water does a patent hold these days when you are trying to get around it by tweaking it a little to be different?

Ok, now I can answer your question to the best of my ablility. If you have for example, a patented tong brick lifter, and sears is selling a tong battery lifter. If you take sears to court for infringement on your patent, they may find prior art or an “in-force patent” before your patent date, and use it against your patent. Now your patent is infringing. My opinion is, I would still do my own patent infringement search before anything, and then, yes I would try to patent it.

Ouote: from David Pressman (Patent it yourself) “A patent contains much more technical information than what’s in its claims; all of this technical information can be used as prior art, just as if the patent were an article in a technical magazine”.

Wow Todd! Thanks for that awesome and in-depth list of steps to follow!

Thank you Todd. I’m a newbie at this inventing stuff, so there’s no such thing as too much information for me, you know? I learn something new every time I sign on to EN and read the forums. Because of your generosity, I’ll benefit from your wealth of knowledge somewhere down the line. I’ve found some very special people through EN, (a big hello to Julie Brown…she’s the best!) and everyone seems to want to help each other out and share and root for one another. Spending time on EN is a good place to be.
Thanks again.

Thank you Todd. I paid $650 in 1999 for a patent search so I am sure they are more now. If I ever get another idea and want to pursue it, I will use your guidelines. (Well, actually, I have friends who will shoot my knee caps off if I even THINK about starting another venture.)

Thank you Mary Ann – that was very sweet but I think it is a little too early to be lifting that jelly jar….
(smile…)

Your welcome everyone,
Hi again Julie, (I agree Mary, Julie is awesome)
I went to a chicago attorney back in 1996 for a different idea of mine. I left this first visit an hour later with 300 dollar less in my pocket. He did what I now would consider an unrelated search on my idea. I did’nt know the difference back then. In 1997 I finally found an attorney who had time for me and my idea. I paid $1100.00 for a very good patent search, well worth it, and I would do it agian if I did’nt have these steps for searching. If you get a good attorney or agent that gives you a heads up on everything and does’nt leave you in the dark, they are well worth the money.

I am sorry, but while there is some useful information provided in this thread, many of the search suggestions are off base or at least misleading if not time wasting.

For one, if you are to rely on basic keyword searches, you can literally spend months on end searching patents and you will still be at least somewhat lucky if you find a patent on an invention that is a.) identical to yours, and b.) disclosed in a patent that shouldn’t necessarily take you more than a day to find. Not only is it hard (if not impossible in many cases) to sufficiently limit results to a workable amount using basic keywords and phrases as there are there tons of patents out there on inventions in tons of different fields, but there are many different ways to describe different things and patents often do not use the same language as a layperson.

For example, say you have invented a new kind of golf ball. If conducting basic keyword searches, even if you are limiting your searches to patent titles to sufficiently limit your result sets, you are going to need to search for single words like “ball,” “round,” “object,” “golf,” “cylindrical,” etcetera in order to conduct anything resembling a thorough search. That gives you thousands if not a million of results to look through, and then there’s still a decent chance that the one patent you absolutely need to find is titled “Progressive depth oblong dimples” (see patent 6,475,105).

If you are going to rely in any real capacity on relatively simple keyword searches, you should be using a site like Google Patents or freepatentsonline.com that will allow for results to be sorted based on relevancy.

Next, international classifications tend to be rather broad (and US patents might not always be assigned to the right one). US classifications (for US patents) and ECLA classifications (for foreign patents and occasionally US patents) are significantly better options. ECLA classes are largely identical to International Classes at the top levels, but end up extending into much greater detail.

Further, the classifications you search should be specifically pertinent to your invention, and usually it is prudent to search multiple classes (slash subclasses).

And, especially if you are using free resources like espacenet, it is not generally time effective to search patents from all foreign databases. Searching espacenet you will get a lot of duplicate results, a lot of foreign language results, and when push comes to shove WIPO PCT publications, European Patents, and Japanese Patent Abstracts are the databases you would typically want to be most concerned with. Using a site like freepatentsonline.com, you can search all of these databases while you also search US patents and patent apps. Using espacenet you can limit your result sets by adding a two character country code to the “Publication Number” field (i.e. US for US, EP for European Patent Office, WO for WIPO, JP for Japanese, etcetera).

“5) This is all about saving money. save this site under your favorites http://www.patentgenius.com/inventor.html you can view full patents here.”

This is not about saving money (and suspiciously resembles spam). You can view full patents on the USPTO’s site (alternatiff plug in is required to view images). You can also, for free, view full patents on other sites (like freepatentsonline.com and others) and download PDFs easily on these sites. When I pull up patentgenius.com, that site doesn’t even appear to work for pulling up patents and even if it did it would not appear that it is providing anything special relative to other sites. Generally, it is obviously most convenient to pull up patents on whatever site you happen to be searching on.

Anyways, I will follow with a new post or two, copying and pasting some stuff I have previously written on the subject of patent searching.

A truly competent professional searcher should have the experience and derived expertise, and at times subscription based tools, to conduct patent searches more efficiently that you can. That said, if you have a good internet connection, you tend to have access to the same databases any professional searcher or USPTO examiner has access to. It is perfectly possible to conduct a good search on your own. If you are on a budget, it might make a lot of sense to do so. If nothing else, it is often smart to see what you can find yourself before paying anybody to find it for you.

There are three methods of patent searching (which can be combined via boolean searching):

Classification searching: The USPTO classifies patents into different classes and subclasses – an index can be found here -

http://www.uspto.gov/go/classification/

ECLA Classes (the ECLA system derives from the European Patent Office as an improvement on the traditionally used International Classification system) -

http://preview.espacenet.com/eclasrch

Keyword Searching: You can search patents using keywords.

Reference Searching: Most patents reference similar prior art, and may be referenced by other patents as well.

Classification searching still seems to be a staple at many patent search firms and law offices (it was the only realistic way to search pre-internet). Classification searching still tends to be far more accurate than conducting keyword or boolean searches that do not take classification into account. The problem with sticking solely to classification searching however – particularly in this day and age, and particularly when you are searching US patents – is that you have more and more applications being filed, more and more convergence of technologies and such, and you have tired examiners and no consistent authority for determining and selecting the proper classification(s) of a patent. Yes, some searches, you can search two subclasses and be done with a very respectable search. But other searches, there literally may not even be a list of 50-100+ subclasses that could potentially be likely to contain relevant patents. I find that most searches I conduct fall somewhere in between the two extremes.

Also, published applications are routinely mis-classified…

In the past, this was somewhat besides the point, because it was simply not time or cost effective to look over every patent in 50 different subclasses. However, modern search tools (like Delphion or to a lesser extent even the USPTO’s online resources or freepatentsonline.com) provide the ability to form complex search criteria, allowing you to search a narrow or wide range of classes/subclasses, further narrowing results down by various keywords and keyword combinations, keyword modifications and synonyms, proximity, etcetera.

If you know what you are doing, taking advantage of this tends to make for an effective supplement to a thorough review of the most relevant subclasses. “Back-checking” via classification-less boolean searching with more narrow keyword criteria, and a review of references cited by the patents you have located can also be useful.

Some last notes: there is no one way to conduct an ideal search, and not all searches are equal, and should be treated according to whatever makes sense; within patent publications, various products and their features are not always described in a conventional manner; Also – where the purpose of a patent search is to determine patentability, searching for non-patent prior art (which just about refers to anything that isn’t a patent) is just as relevant as searching patents.

Some of the sites out there:

Patent searching:

www.uspto.gov (obviously)

www.freepatentsonline.com – slightly enhanced features compared to the USPTO’s site.

www.sumobrain.com – I haven’t used it but I believe it is the same as www.freepatentsonline.com just slightly better.

Google Patents – Great for pre-lim searching or “back checking.” Best when used in conjunction with another site.

www.delphion.com – The best site (and most convenient) in terms of features/advanced search capabilities. Not free.

www.espacenet.com – Good if you need to search foreign databases not searchable via the other free sites, or if you want to use ECLA classifications to search patents (the international classification system is different than the US one, and in some searches an ECLA subclass or two might be more pertinent to a search than any US subclass). freepatentsonline/SumoBrain allow you to search WO/EP/JP, though, and those are the databases you will usually be concerned about. Delphion offers broad access and enables searching by ECLA classes and more.

www.patentscourge.com – This is a Google Custom Search engine set up by Criterion Dynamics (really, set up by me). As a tool for searching patents/patent apps it is only so so. It is a respectable resource for searching certain sources of non-patent prior art.

I am sorry, but while there is some useful information provided in this thread, many of the search suggestions are off base or at least misleading if not time wasting.

No need to be sorry, were all about helping each other. So thank you.
Todd

I think I found the problem with searching with patent numbers on step 5 and 6. Take the commas ( , ) out of the patent number, than go to http://www.patentgenius.com/inventor.html paste it in the “patent number” search box. than it will pull up all of the patent text and all the drawings.

5) This is all about saving money. save this site under your favorites http://www.patentgenius.com/inventor.html you can view full patents here.

6) Copy the patent # without commas from http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html and paste here http://www.patentgenius.com/inventor.html free

Thank you again for catching this Criterion Dynamics. Do you have a name?
I noticed you have to sign up and give a lot of personal information to view PDF drawings on www.freepatentsonline.com Do they sell this personal info to other company’s?

Thank you all very good information!

I have a different method

using Google image search with the words like

(toy train patent drawings)

I find this different method throws in Patents you could not always find,it is a type of anomaly search very random and give’s you a Patent number that will take you in a different direction.

Plus giving you quick visual pictures of many Patents at the same time, this method has its limitations but, it could be helpful. Used with all the above methods

Thanks, Todd, for creating this thread and the great search methods and thanks for the helpful replies from criteriond and others.

The text of Patents granted prior to 1976 is not searchable on the USPTO site. I have found a lot of these older prior arts by searching the closest thing to my ideas in later patents and then clicking on the “Referenced By” field. Then, for references found, repeat the process as many times as possible for any related patents found. Related patents closest to 1975 seem to turn up the oldest references. The images of patents prior to 1976 often list prior arts as well – usually near the end of the last page.

Some may say “who cares about patents that old?” While that may be a valid question for many patent ideas in this digital age, for simple mechanical ideas or claims, finding those early patents can be a great time-saver and has caused me to abandon more than one idea before hiring an attorney.

That’s one way. How do y’all search for these early patents?

I attended a speach by a current USPTO examiner a few months ago. When asked about patent searching, his quote was “our website sucks, use google”. I agree. My two favorite free search sites are:
www.google.com/patents
(hint: choose advanced search)
and
http://www.boliven.com/patents
(this site will show you graphs and trends of patent activity in your area plus also search SEC filings, press releases all at the same time – and its free).

“The text of Patents granted prior to 1976 is not searchable on the USPTO site. I have found a lot of these older prior arts by searching the closest thing to my ideas in later patents and then clicking on the “Referenced By” field. Then, for references found, repeat the process as many times as possible for any related patents found. Related patents closest to 1975 seem to turn up the oldest references. The images of patents prior to 1976 often list prior arts as well – usually near the end of the last page.”

Aside from reference checks, Google patents is definitely a useful tool for searching pre-1970 or so patents. Prior to Google Patents, that was only possible with a relatively expensive subscription to MicroPatent. Unfortunately, Google Patents does not allow you to search pre-1976 patents via classification (in addition to keywords and what not), and its OCR (optical character recognition) does not always work perfectly…

Classification searching is often a must when searching these patents, if the goal is a truly thorough search. Of course, classification searching is already a must to a large extent in sense, for all patents. While it is ideal to look through all patents within the most relevant subclasses, one tip: if you feel like you must try and narrow your results significantly beyond 1970, you can still use the USPTO’s site (or an alternate site) to search for patents falling within specific classes or subclasses and also falling within a specific, second class or subclass in addition.