A Discussion About Utility Patent And Provisional Application

Patent Search or Prior Art Search is the most important skill that beginning Patent Agents and Patent Analysts must learn.

The principles of Patent Search remains the same though the methods of doing the patent search will vary from database to database.

What is an Invention?

Is the invention patentable? If the examiner feels that the inventive step is established, you are likely to get a patent.

Patent Examiners determine Non Obviousness or Inventive Step by listing out the key features of the claimed invention first with respect to the priority date of the patent application.

The priority date of the patent application is the date on which it is first filed for patent protection in any patent office anywhere in the world.

Please note my words Invention as claimed and this means that only the claims made in the patent application will be examined for patent-ability by the Examiners and not the specification and other parts of the patent application. The other parts of the patent application must provide antecedent support to the claims. If the examiner is able to find prior art documents either from patent applications published earlier than the priority date of your patent application or technical journal articles published prior to priority date, for all the key features of the invention as explained above, he will combine the prior Art document A that teaches key feature 1, Document B that teaches key feature 2, Document C that teaches key feature 3, Document D that teaches key feature 4 and Document E that disclosed key feature 5. You learn to think like a Patent Examiner and examine like a Patent Examiner.

In my next article I will discuss the various Free Patent Databases available to do Patent Searches and I will proceed in future articles about the methodologies of doing Patent Search in a number of patent databases.

Patent Search - Why Should You Do Prior Art Searches?

Yes, there is another kind of patent present for the legal protection of the new invention. When it is the matter of provisional patent, then we must mention that it is never the part of any original patent. Because, provisional patent is valid only for 12 months. This patent is important to secure the early filing date for the follow-up patent application.