Prior Art Search

Patents are recognized as a valuable source of information due to the disclosure of technical and scientific information in them. An essential purpose of the patent system is to deliver information to the public. The patent system allows legal and technological information to be delivered to the populace. Legal information include  publishing details of patented material , the legal scope, publication countries, assignees, and when it passes into the public domain. Technological information, such as a patent’s so-called ‘teaching’ or technical disclosure, which is required to give a skilled reader all the information needed to put the new technology into practical effect.

Patents play a crucial role in protecting ones IP rights. A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. When a company or individual launches a product in a new market particularly in technology sectors where there is extensive patenting, there is a high risk that commercialization may be blocked by a competitor who holds a patent for a technology used in that product. If this scenario comes to fruition, then the infringing party might suffer huge financial losses, for example they could be asked to stop the launch or to compensate the patent holder. Freedom to operate is the capacity to operate in a given jurisdiction without infringing on another’s intellectual property rights.

The analyst conducting the novelty search will require a detailed disclosure of the invention. Additional information such as drawings and figures are also useful to get a clear understanding of the invention.

An inventor must provide answers to the following questions describe the invention:

The patentable subject matter defined in 35 U.S.C. 101 as any “process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter. A patent can be granted if it discloses a new product or process, that has an inventive step, and do not seem obvious to a person having ordinary skills in the art (in particular technical field) and has industrial applicability or utility.

A Novelty search, sometime interchangeably used with patentability search, is a type of prior art search which includes patent and non-patent literature search conducted to determine whether the invention is novel, or not.  A patent can be obtained on an invention if it necessarily meets the following three conditions: