The inventor has to think about conducting an individual patent examination before a patent attorney. The patent is given to new ideas. If another person comes up with your idea before you, you may not get a patent. That's too bad. But it gets worse if you pay a lot of money just to find out that someone hit you on a punch.
By taking a few minutes to perform a simple search, inventors often find that they are not the first people they really have good ideas. The term of art used for the proof that someone came up with your invention before you became "prior art". Prior art may be a patent, patent application, product, or article embodying your invention. If you find the same prior art as your invention, you need to rethink the patent application.
The first step is to decide which keywords explain your invention. If you want to purchase a patent rather than purchasing an invention patent, think about the words to use for searching. If there is a series of keywords, extend that set considering another way to explain the invention. Try 3 or 4 different keyword sets.
After creating keywords, you can start looking. There are several free and easy-to-use sites. One of the user-friendly sites is search, but only US patent database is searched. The US Patent and Trademark Office also has a free search site. It is difficult to use, but you can learn the basics in a few minutes. After searching several patent databases, please try general search using keywords. You may find articles or products similar to your invention.
Use the results to determine whether you should seek patent protection for your invention. If you find a prior art similar to your idea, the patent may not be a good idea. But please look carefully at the prior art before you abandon the invention. Even though someone else has general ideas, there may be other ways of inventing essential inventions or choke points that can be protected.
If you can not find the prior art for your invention, the patent may be a good idea. Please consult with a patent attorney about how to proceed. She needs to use an experienced search expert with a lot of expertise to find relevant prior art and provide it to perform another patent search for you. I encourage inventors to ask another agent to search for agents even if they already do their work. Perhaps it will outweigh the prior art you forgot, but you need to consider it.
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