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What is a Patent? A patent for an invention is a grant of a property right by the United States government to the inventor (or his or her heirs or assigns), acting though the Patent and Trademark Office. The term of the patent shall be 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the Unted States or, if the application contains a specific reference to an earlier filed application under 35 U.S.C. 120, 121, or 365(c), from the date the earliest such applicaiton was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. The right conferred by the patent grant extends only throughout the Unted States and its territories and possessions. The patent grant is the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling, or importing the invention. This right can be sold or licensed to third parties in return for fees and royalties. See General Information Concerning PATENTS, by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Department of Commerce; Patent and Trademark Office http://www.uspto.gov To see the place of patents in a larger landscape of sources, visit the ATEIS visual. Typical question for which patents may be your best source: Who owns the right to manufacture a given invention (defined as a new and useful machine, process, composition of matter, design, plant or biological matter) in a given country? For
example, when was T. A. Edison's electric lamp
patented? NOTE that "invention" may be a method, process or technique, a program, a tangible design (NOT IDEA) that can become a system, plant or a product. Use patents to study the history of science and technology since 1790. You learn about technical problems, societal changes, markets and competitors. Patents differ from copyright (applied to the expression of an idea in software and art), trademark (a recognizable logo of a company or product), and trade secret (undisclosed inventions). A copyright protects artistic and literary works such as books, motion pictures, visual and performing arts, software, and sound recordings http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright For more information about challenges that digital technologies pose for national and international regulation of intellectual property rights, see Pamela Samuelson. 1996. "Intellectual property rights and the global information economy." Communications of the ACM, January issue, 39 (1): 23-28. A trademark is a name, symbol (design) or phrase used in commerce to identify a product or service (e.g., the COCA-COLA company; McDonald's "golden arches"), certify quality or geographic origin. In short, a trademark is a brand name. Examples are Saturn "rings"; McDonald's "golden arches." For more information, see http://www.uspto.gov Index of patents issued from the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office. Vols./Dates: 1873- Washington : The Office. Continues: Index of patents issued from the United States Patent Office. URL T 223 U58 Current subscription. USPTO has its own freely searchable bibliographic database from 1976 to present at: http://www.uspto.gov . New Trade Names Dictionary: A Guide to Newly Noted Trade Names, Brand Names, Product Names, Model Names, and Design Names, with Addresses of Their Manufacturers, Marketers, or Distributors. 2 volumes. Wood, Donna, ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1987. This compilation of trade names, brand names, etc. arranged in one alphabetical order, covers apparel, automobiles, candy, paper products, and so on. Each entry gives a brief description of the product, company name and address. To find similar publications, search under: Trademarks--United
States. Other links to patents are available at: Delphion Intellectual Property Network (January 5, 1971 to present) searches a variety of patent collections http://www.delphion.com/. In one place, you can search US patents as well as WIPO PCT publications, INPADOC (trial phase), and more. Each record consists of inventor(s)'s name, applicants, dates, legal status, abstracts, firm (attorney, agent). The cite also includes over 1.4 million European Patent Office and World Intellectual Property Office patents and applications. There are WHAT'S NEW, Help with IPN at and FAQ pages, as well as information on the interesting HISTORY AND BACKGROUND of the site and a patent RESOURCE PAGE. Browse through their Gallery Archive http://www.delphion.com/gallery for bizarre and the Wacky Patent of the Month. Look up toe puppet or a disposable biodegradable toothbrush. For patents issues before 1971, click the PATENT and TRADEMARK DEPOSITORY LIBRARY icon on FAQ pages. Fee-based Web sites to patents are produced by Chemical Abstracts Service (Chemical Patents Plus, 1975-) http://casweb.cas.org/chempatplus of full-text chemical patents, and by Derwent's World Patent Index http://www.derwent.com The European Patent Office (EPO) has an impressive list of hyperlinks of patent related websites http://www.epo.co.at/online/index.htm
Chuk Huber of the University of California, Santa Barbara has developed Patent sources; the site is: http://www.library.ucsb.edu/subj/patents.html by James W. Clasper of the Engineering Library, University of Cincinnati http://www.engrlib.uc.edu/selfhelp/plist.html, the GeorgiaTech http://ibid.library.gatech.edu/~mp17/patents/ as well as the MIT Engineering Library http://libraries.mit.edu/barker/Subjects/patents.html. |