The faculty and staff at the UAB Libraries are not lawyers and cannot provide legal advice. The services of the UAB Libraries are only intended to help educate you about searching for patents and other intellectual property materials. For legal advice, please consult a licensed lawyer.
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) offers a tool to help you decide what kind of intellectual property (IP) your work qualifies as - trademark, patent, copyright, or trade secret - based on a few questions. Give it a try if you're not sure what to pursue for your invention!
Normally when we are planning to conduct a search for information in a database, we have to start with keywords that we expect to lead us to results. For example, if I wanted to learn more information about an iPhone, I might go to my favorite search engine and type in "iPhone," which would yield results like these:
While that might be useful information, it isn't going to give you background on the intellectual property aspects of the iPhone - what about this device is protected so that other manufacturers can't make their own copy to sell?
In order to find the patent(s) related to the iPhone, we cannot simply search for "iPhone" in a patent database. Conducting a search for "iPhone" in the USPTO Patent Public Search Basic database yields over 82,000 results that may not even include the one you're interested in! Unlike books, music, and movies, patents are not required to have original titles or to contain product brand names. It is much more likely that an invention's patent will have a title that is more descriptive about the purpose of the invention or, perhaps, the materials used to make it. Believe it or not, the original patent for the iPhone (and the ones that followed with subsequent versions) is simply titled "Electronic device."
Image from Andre, B.K.; et al. (2012). Electronic device (U.S. Patent No. D672,769 S). U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/D672769
Because key words are not going to work the way we're used to, it's important to strategize how we can effectively conduct a "prior art search" to determine what patents might exist that are similar to the product we want to invent and patent ourselves. A way to generate some search terms that may help you find patents for certain devices is to start by asking yourself the following questions. (Used with permission from a Patent Search Strategy Worksheet created by the University of Iowa Libraries.)
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has a very useful seven-step strategy for searching for U.S. patents. This same strategy can be used in other patent databases for international patents as well.
While the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) might be an obvious place to start, there are some other patent searching tools that you may find a little more approachable. Here are the tools I recommend most highly:
One Hundred Patents That Shaped the Modern World (2018)
Intellectual Property Law for Engineers and Scientists (2004)
Nolo's Patents for Beginners (2004)
Patenting Art and Entertainment (2004)
The design of this page was partly adapted from Research: By Course, Subject, or Topic, by University of Arizona Libraries, © 2020 The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of The University of Arizona, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
