Archive for the ‘File Wrapper’ Category

Invalidation Search – Additional Keywords

July 21, 2008

How to take the help of examiner for finding out the additional keywords (I call them lateral keywords)

Please note here I’m not talking about File Histories or ISRs to look at the keystrings used by the Examiner. The concept is to utilize the backward citations of the patent and identify the citations that are not from the same domain but still serving the same purpose. Extract the keywords from these citations and mix them with your normal keywords to obtain relevant results from different domain.

For example, there was a patent related to Location Based Service in Mobiles. For those who are not aware about LBSs, these services provide a way to identify your location (through mobile) and tell you the right path you should walk or move to reach to your destination. Something simliar to GPS. There are various patents that are build on such kind of concept, amongst which one was mine. My patent talked about calling a fixed number (XXXX), provided by a company, that end up to the customer care that is nearest to the user.

Nice concept.

I went through the backward citation and found a patent related to emergency help. The patent was not similar but the idea strike me through. I started looking for patents that are related to emergency location based service. Thats it!!..After some analysis I got the patent that I was looking for…. The patent was related to a Police Van, where a fixed number is dialed and the call is automatically routed to the nearest Police Van in the users area.

Good.

Patent Invalidated.

My Fourth Strategy…

August 29, 2007

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.