Easy Patent Guide

A patent is an official document given by a national government to an inventor (or business or corporation) who wishes to have sole rights over a product for a limited amount of time. Once the patent is granted, no one else has the right to make, sell, market, or profit from the invention.

A lot of valuable information is now available of the industries in different databases in the web. Among all those patents the most important and easily available. Patent searching can give insights into the state of the art across any technical field. It can provide a platform to monitor the competitors activities by revealing which companies are involved in a field of technology of your interest. Patent searching data can also reveal the technological road map to a particular invention, the science or logic behind the invention, and its intended application.

The recent patent application filed by Google details numerous items the search engine uses to rank web pages. The specific application is summarized as:

“A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data.”

The patent application sheds significant light for those pursuing search engine optimization with Google. Patent applications can be difficult to understand, so following are highlights that you should consider for your SEO efforts.

Sometimes Patent and Trademark are used interchangeably. And find it difficult to tell the difference between the two.

Patent confers a right to the inventor to “exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. A trademark, on the other hand, is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark.

The Patent services determine the invention’s patentability. This is done by carefully reviewing the invention. The examination process of Patent Services usually lasts for 12 to 18 months. The Patent services will not tell you if your invention has already been invented by someone else unless you apply for a patent. The Patent services examiners only verify that the description and claims per description by their inventors are new, unique, and not obvious to the Patent services. Patent Services could not make confirmation with regards to the usefulness or profitability of the invention.

Patent management is important especially among corporations because it can build shareholder value if done effectively. Profit margins are increasingly under pressure in today’s global economy. It is therefore important for shareholders and top management to realize that patent managements can bring additional revenues to companies. They will increasingly expect IP rights, in particular patent rights, to be managed as a business, turning, where possible, a traditionally expensive patent operation into a source of profits.

In patent investigations the major challenge for most IP workers is to know where and how to retrieve up-to-date, high-quality patent as well as patent-related information. Well, for simple searches regarding a known patent number, inventor, assignee, head title, etc. there are already a couple of easy-to-use Internet sources provided by national and international patent authorities. For instance esp@cenet (EPODOC), DEPATISnet and the USPTO databases. These are good places to start the patent investigations of inventions.