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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | OCTOBER 3, 2000 SMART ANSWERS A DIY Guide to Patent Research The Net has great tools for helping you learn about protecting your idea. But sometimes, you still have to go with the pros
Q: My company has an idea for a modification to an existing product design. How do I find out if there's a patent on my idea, or if one is pending? Also, if a product originates outside the U.S. and company literature claims it is patented overseas, does that protect it from competition here? ----Tom Jevert, Grand Rapids, Mich. A: Legal experts say patent protection is valid only in the country or region where the patent was issued. So a patent issued overseas cannot be used to block you from making or selling the same product in the U.S. But you need to make sure, before you sink any money into this project, that the foreign company in question has not filed a corresponding U.S. patent application. Numerous university libraries and inventors' groups can help you do a patent search yourself, or you can pay a search service or an intellectual-property attorney to search U.S. and foreign patent databases for you. If you're a do-it-yourselfer, start at your nearest Patent & Trademark Depository Library. This network of special libraries houses all the U.S. patents from the first patent ever issued to the most recent -- and every state has at least one. Reference librarians on staff can advise you on the patent-search process. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (www.uspto.gov) lists the locations of all of the depository libraries on its Web site at www.uspto.gov/go/ptdl. If you're not close enough to a patent-depository library to visit in person, the Web has plenty of resources to help you search online. Nolo.com, a self-help law center, offers books and articles about intellectual-property and patent searches at www.nolo.com. The University of Texas at Austin has posted a detailed tutorial on patent searching at www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/ENG/PTUT/ptut.html. CAN BE COSTLY. You can get preliminary information on intellectual-property protections overseas at the sites of the World Intellectual Property Organization (www.wipo.org) and the European Patent Office (http://www.european-patent-office.org). The U.S. Patent Office lists links to patent offices in more than two dozen countries at www.uspto.gov/web/menu/other.html. You can also buy patent-search services from many companies that offer computerized database research for a fee. QPAT (www.qpat.com) offers U.S. patents dating to 1974 and European patents dating to 1987 in some categories. Despite your diligent efforts, if a product-design patent is pending but has not yet been formally issued, you may not be able to locate it on the searchable databases that are available to the public, says Ivan Hoffman, a Santa Monica (Calif.)-based intellectual-property attorney. "If you get to that point and you're committed to moving forward, you should probably pay an attorney to have a formal patent search done," he says. Since patents may exist on certain aspects of your device and you'll probably want to do a foreign patent search also, be forewarned that the search can be costly and complicated. Protecting your design is just a start. If you're also looking for help with issues like research, prototypes, commercialization, and licensing, try The Entrepreneur Network (http://tenonline.org/index.html), a nonprofit corporation dedicated to helping Midwest inventors and entrepreneurs, and The National Technology Transfer Center (iridium.nttc.edu). The NTTC site includes a list of resources and associations aimed specifically at inventors at iridium.nttc.edu/assist/inventions/inv_links.html.   | | |
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