Patents are no longer only used in legal services and R & D. Indeed, a CFO may have to conduct a search in a database of patents for assessing the value of portfolio patents of a company before acquiring it. In the same way a head of business development will also lead this type of research if it wishes to acquire licenses to expand the portfolio of products his company. More generally, follow the emergence of new patents of its competitors, check the status of the prior art before starting a project, or to protect its own portfolio represent so many requirements for businesses.
The financial stakes of effective research on the state of the art previous preliminary step to launch a project are enormous, and the more so that investments are high. The main objective of this research is twofold: to limit the risk of violation of existing patents and check before filing a patent that no similar patent has been filed so as not to risk the invalidation. In some cases, patents are drafted so as to go unnoticed so that its owner can claim high compensation for patent infringement.
Patents are made available free of charge by IPOs, such as:
– The United States Patent and Trademark Office
– European Patent Office
– Intellectual Property Office of Canada
– The World Intellectual Property Organization
The website of the Patent Information Users Group offers a comprehensive list of websites of various patent offices throughout the world.
It is also possible to search for patents on search engines dedicated to that purpose which include Google Patent search, which allows you to search among the 7 million patents by the USPTO which dates back prior to 1790. Research results are sorted by relevance algorithms using advanced search Google. You can also use EspaceNetpour search on the site of the EPO. This site makes available 50 million patents and patent applications. It may finally have recourse to Freepatentonline.
Search engines free patents are very useful for a first approach to a subject. However, when it wishes to conduct a more thorough search, it is preferable to use the data banks of patents that have paid research opportunities more advanced, but above all documents relating to patents and patent applications in the prospect of ‘Pursuit of a state of the art prior effective. Among these databases may include, but are not limited, Derwent Thomson, LexisNexis, Delphion, Micropatent or Minesoft.
These data suggest is a Boolean search is a search based on semantics, sometimes both. We will especially today the data banks of patents that have recently oriented research strategy based on semantics.
For example, Questel LINGWAY and have entered into a technology partnership to develop e-Lingway Patent (LEP), in collaboration with FIST, a subsidiary of CNRS and Oséo. It is a search engine specializes in intellectual property information to be available by the end of the year. This solution is based on text mining and semantic analysis and allow the automatic extraction of strategic information available on patent Questel.
In addition, a new version of the international database of patents PatentCafe rich than 25 million documents relating to patents - useful when searching for the state of the art - and 12 million patents and Semetric search engine was announced recently. This search engine is positioned in the market as an alternative to Boolean search and would find more quickly and more effectively relevant patents to which side would spend the Boolean search engines. Indeed, applications formulables natural language can count up to 4000 words. The engine is based on “latent semantic analysis” is a process of statistical natural language processing to establish conceptual relationships between a set of documents and the words they contain. This method also uses neural networks, so that the software can “learn”. This means that patents which do not include the terms used in the application will therefore still appear in results. , PatentCafe V 2.5 and provides assistance for technology watch, before launching a project, but also for the protection and enhancement of existing patent portfolios.