Invalidation Search – Get hold of German Patents

English search….

80% of people are dependent on that.

There is so much technical literature available in non-English speaking countries that its equally competent to English literature available..

Japanese
Korea
Taiwan
France, and
Germany is one of them

So lets take Germany this time…

How to catch German patents for an invalidatoin search.

There is a very good German website Patents-de

If you know German you can directly search in there, however, if you are not use Google Translation

Paste the link of the German patent website in the box and translate the page to English. Like you can see here

Now can you see the difference between German and English site

Now put the keywords in German and you can see your answers in English!!

isn’t it Great!!

Enjoy Invalidations…

My Fourth Strategy…

Since i’m constantly thinking about family members, more strategies are coming into my mind.

As i told you about File Wrappers in my last post, don’t forget to look at international search reports.

Most of the times you will find WIPO patents as family members. Use their search reports!! Sometimes they turn out to be very useful…

All of these strategies also applies to family members of the relevant prior art that is being finalized after the search. Since patents related to the relevant prior art may also be relevant to us, who knows we may receive a better prior art.

My second strategy…

Make full utilization of family members.

Somtimes they provide very good insights (which i call as internal insights: insights coming from the patent family in question)

Family members can be utilized in various manner.

The first very important use of family members is using their backward and forward citations. Sometimes while doing citation analysis we only check citations of the subject patent as they provide insights on the art that have already been found by the examiner.

Citations of family members are very helpful when a family member was filed after the subject patent. In this case the examiner may find new art that has not been covered under citations of the subject patent.

This is also true when you find a relevant prior art for the subject patent. Do not forget to check family members of the relevant prior art and their citations. Sometimes they may provide a prior art that is more relevant than the one found earlier.