Patent Invalidation Search – Addiction to Web

 

There are a lot of people who are involved in Web based tools for patent searching. I guess its not actually addiction to web but people become addicted to one kind of interface.

Its too difficult to separate one person from one database to another. So why not have a system which is quick. easy and simple and eliminate the need of a browser. You are free to change the Interface according to your own need.

Then I came across a new free tool from IPEXL ‘Excel Client’. This is a desktop based tool which is capable of performing search on various databases.

The best part that I liked about it was its reach to Taiwan and China.

Moreover, since the results are displayed in excel you can easily modify its interface to keep Title, Abstract and Claims together for speedy analysis. OR filter the results with the help of IPC etc.

I believe this should be a boon for the people who use USPTO. A very good tool for Patentability Search, Novelty search, Freedom-to-Operate searches and not to forget patent invalidation searches.

Moreover, people can use it to perform a quick landscape analysis as well. Since all the patents are in Excel one can use the inbuilt charting capabilities of Excel to draw quick charts.

You can download the tool here

Invalidation Search – Products

As we have discussed earlier, patent literature is not the most important mode to invalidate a patent. Products that are present in the market (from sometime) also forms a very good prior art for invalidating the patent.

I agree that not many products mention the process/methodology that are used by them internally, leave apart the technical specification available on website (as its not available for all products). Further, it becomes more important in those cases where you believe that the product must be using the technology of as claimed in the patent but you have no proof to prove the assumption.

I am assuming here that the relevant text is not available from the specification of the product as well as not much information is available on Google.

A technique that can be used in such cases to check for some references it to search on slideshare or Youtube. Since Google is not able to provide results from these websites they are always left behind.

Now, why to search in these websites. There are many inventors, R&D people, professors etc. who host their presentations or talks on these websites. If these people are connected with some product they even provide information on the technology that is being used in the product. Thats what we are looking for!!!…

Most importantly this also becomes a very important strategy for infringement analysis or licensing deals or claim charts or patent valuation etc.