good afternoon this is the level up virtual library instruction session on
patent searching and i'm Roman Koshykar i'm the computing and information sciences librarian at
the rit libraries and i'm happy to be speaking you to you today about the basics of patent searching
in this one of our spring semester 2021 virtual level up sessions where the other librarians and i
discuss briefly discuss a topic that is of interest to our students
um and i certainly hope that if you're watching this uh video that learning about patent searching
is of interest to you and i am aiming this session at the new patent searcher uh
at uh someone who has not engaged in this activity um before now so what are patents
uh they are legal documents that offer protection for certain categories of intellectual property
so um everybody knows um kind of conceptually what uh that means as far as a patent goes
but patents are also rich sources of information about engineering and
design of many different forms of technology so you may be wondering uh why use patents for
research well as a student it's mainly for the second reason there's a great deal of detail
in patents about how things work and how they are made and how they are designed
i'm going to share my screen now and i have some general information concerning patents what i've
pulled up here is some general information concerning patents from the united states
patent and trademark office what are patents trademarks service marks and copyrights so there
are a lot of uh details to go through here but there are three main types of patents uh utility
patents design patents and plant patents and yes you can patent plant breeds or varieties of plants
design patents offer protection for a particular design of an ordinary object so you can't patent
chairs it's too broad of a category but you can patent your specific chair design
utility patents are the biggest category and the broadest class here and they cover just
about the entire built world new inventions are granted utility patents and this is what most
people envision when they think of the term patent components of larger products and so on can also
be granted utility patents as the USPTO says here anyone who invents or discovers any new
and useful process machine article of manufacture or composition of matter or any new and useful
improvement thereof so right away you're kind of getting into this dense legalistic
language around patents a little bit of a little bit of patent trivia for you uh new u.s patents
are issued once a week always on uh Tuesday um and uh today is actually a Wednesday so the uh
the last uh patents were issued uh yesterday by the united states patent and trademark office
uh patents have been issued by the u.s government since 1790 since basically
the beginning of the united states as a nation and the power to issue patents was
written into the constitution and quoting that article of the constitution to promote
the progress of science and the useful arts many other countries issue patents
it is not necessary to be a u.s resident to obtain a u.s patent conversely u.s
residents and u.s based companies can and do obtain patents in other countries as well
on the RIT libraries uh info guide system we maintain a uh an info guide to researching
patents uh and i recommend that everybody uh use this info guide and this will also be
linked to from our guide on the level up virtual series as well but if you just search info guides
for patents you will find this or go directly to infoguides.rit.edu patents to access this page
so on the start page we have a quick strategy for what we in our library recommend as the the best
entry point for patent research and uh i will spend time more uh time on this later there's also
an entry point to the patent classification system uh under the box labeled browsing patent topics
and then a link to our list of patent databases which is actually a separate page on this guide
and this is a very important location here since patents are public information they are
free to use meaning that you shouldn't have to pay for digital versions of patents um and the
most up-to-date source comes from the united states patent and trademark office the USTPO uh
maintains a u.s patent full-text database that is the source that is updated once a week on Tuesdays
there are several other sources including uh google yes you can google patents
but if you follow our strategy that we recommend at the RIT libraries
google is more of a secondary source for obtaining the text of the patent document
rather than conducting the basic research on the books page and the tutorials and information pages
i will allow you to access those if you're interested if you're interested in taking a
deeper dive into the world of patents there's some useful information found there and then finally on
consult a librarian you can contact myself as the computing and information sciences librarian or
you can contact Linette Koren as our engineering librarian for patent research advice and guidance
now please note at this point we cannot help you apply for a patent as we are not attorneys
we're librarians and we're unable to provide legal advice so what we are interested in is
helping students conduct research into patents so let's go to our patent databases page
and do a sample search in the u.s patent full text database um the quick search allows you to search
terms in certain fields of a patent and i think it's really valuable to do this um the default
is to search for your term here in all fields that's kind of a search engine like interface
but i actually would recommend not to do this okay i believe that uh it is uh not recommended
it's too imprecise i believe that it's too imprecise for me to recommend as a librarian so
instead what you might want to do is try searching for your terms in the in the title or the abstract
of the patent documents and if you have a patent classification information either the current u.s
classification or what's known as the CPC cooperative the CPC classification
that's a cooperative American and European system which is used to classify patents you may use that
to increase the precision of your search sometimes in more advanced settings you may already have
that information or you may have started with a patent that's classified according to different um
or a certain uh set of U.S. or CPC classification codes you can use those codes to identify
more patents of the same uh class meaning that they're patents on the same type of technology
other fields of interest in here the inventor and the assignee the inventor
um is the individual credited with developing the IP
the assignees however are the actual holder of the patent and the assignee can be the same as
the inventor most often however the assignee is a business corporation or other organization
so let's do a sample search here i'd like to know if RIT holds any patents related to sensors
so how can i perform the search i can set the assignee name to Rochester Institute of Technology
and i'll type that in and then this is just a boolean and right so and or or and not so
um using some boolean logic here we're just uh connecting these two terms uh
so that they're intersected so that we're finding these terms in the same document
pretty straightforward i think but i want to change this from all fields to
the abstract field and does the abstract field contain the word sensors
okay and we will uh do a search there now notice the data is current through
march 16th that was yesterday today is march 17th um Wednesday versus a Tuesday so this is the most
current set of patent information available uh in the united states so here we are there are
in fact two patents that have the word sensors in the abstract so they're kind of about sensors
or use sensors and they are owned by Rochester Institute of Technology so RIT is the assignee
all right let's take a look at a sample patent here
uh you'll notice that the patent number is found here and they're presented in patent number order
the larger the patent number the more recently it was issued so uh this one is newer than this one
and uh allow the database to retrieve the document here the title is method and system for monitoring
terrain and gate and predicting upcoming terrain utilizes one or more sensors so that's that's why
sensors is in the abstract here and here are the inventors they are the individuals named
um but the assignee the owner of the patent is Rochester Institute of Technology
so the date of the issue is found under the patent number i'll draw your attention up
here this is patent number 10,524,699 it was issued January 7, 2020. okay
um the file date is found a little bit lower here so um filed December 20th, 2013. so note
that it took more than six years for this patent to actually uh be granted and that's not unusual
oftentimes it does take a very long time for uh the process of review to be completed
and for the patent to go from applied and um filed to uh actually uh granted
and assigned prior publication data comes below here any um related u.s patent documents are
issued references cited to existing u.s patents and if a if applicable any foreign patents uh and
uh any additional literature non-patent literature can also be cited as well and then you get to um
the claims oh and i'm sorry i uh skipped over something here also within this prior publication
data lump is the uh U.S. class and CPC classes so if you are interested in finding other patents on
the same kind of topic you could search for other patents that are assigned these classes
and uh of course these don't really mean much out of context you would have to actually go
i'm going back to my guide here you would have to go to the index to the united states
patent classification system to try to find out what uh us class 1/1 actually refers to
under that section is the claims so the claims what is claimed is
this is the legal justification for claiming exclusive rights to this IP
and it's a pretty dense stuff and further down in the document you get the description
what exactly is it how does it work and this may also include technical diagrams and drawings
if applicable now you may have noticed something at this point the individual records in this USPTO
full text database are pretty hard to read and if you've ever seen a printed patent document what's
on the screen here looks almost nothing like it so going back to the patents info guide here is that
box labeled patent searching strategy so you want to start your patent search by searching
the USPTO database that's where i was just looking for the sample patent uh and then
once you've identified it note the patent number and then use the patent numbers to
find the full text patent documents in google or in another recommended full text document source
so you can google the patent number and get a nice full text copy
in PDF form if it's a new enough patent of this particular document so we'll use the uh this one
as an example the second one we'll just go to
google
and i added in the term patent because i was getting some irrelevant results there i thought
it would just recognize it as a patent number but here it is um data processing systems and methods
this is also assigned to RIT nice abstract for you there and then you can also use google to
find similar patents that's interesting but most importantly you can download the PDF
and see right away hey there are technical uh drawings and diagrams included and they're nicely
presented here and that's just not as easy to get at in the uh USPTO database well why not just
use google as a starting point for your patent research well google takes some time to catch
up to the USPTO so it is not the definitive in uh source in the same way it's not accurate up to the
current week as is the USPTO full text database and google doesn't really offer the same field
searching and advanced searching options which makes your searches much more precise in the USPTO
full text database now again we have recommended under the patent databases page of the info guide
a link here to the us patent full text database but there are a few
other sources that are out there that might be of interest to explore as well
so in conclusion i want you to visit this patents info guide for more information or to contact a
librarian for helpful advice and guidance one more point to note here is that we are very fortunate
in um to have an official patent depository library um in Rochester though it is not at RIT
the Carlson Center for Intellectual Property is located at the Rochester Public Library
in downtown Rochester and they have a website here and i will provide that as well on the
Level Up Virtual info guide page this is an official patent and trademark resource
center as you can see by the logo here so um named so by the u.s patent office and even more patent
and trademark and copyright resources can be found uh here than those available to you at rit
but even here they do um have a statement about um you know no legal advice or patentability
determination can be made you know again we're librarians we cannot give out legal advice or
assist in filing uh filling out forms so that's not exactly uh what any of librarians even at the
official patent and trademark resource center and the Rochester Public Library so
if you really want to get involved with researching patents and perhaps
preparing someday to apply for your own patent then you may take the next step to contact
the Carlson Center at the Rochester Public Library thank you for your time and attention and please
do contact myself or one of the other librarians to get assistance with this kind of work