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Are you a small-business owner developing a product that you wish to protect from your competitors? Need to determine if your idea for a company or product name is already taken? Or to save you going down blind alleys? You may be able to do much of this research yourself before you engage the services of a patent agent. A basic search can be done on the web for very little cost provided you use the appropriate websites and are aware of the basic procedures of the patent system. This fact sheet covers the main free sites .

Official Patent Websites

Most patenting authorities have their own websites and offer searching and retrieval of full-text documents. Many government sites acknowledge that their sites are designed as an "information awareness programme and not as professional search engines" and some will actually conduct a search for you if you need more in-depth information, though such work is not free.

UK Patent Office is catching up with the rest of the world but for patents you should use Espacenet. The site does have a Patent Status Service This facility makes it possible to check the patent's priority and filing dates, verify the applicant or owner, identify the inventor, establish whether the patent is in force and contact the owner or their representative. What the site excels at is access to all the information about getting a patent in the UK, as well as searchable databases on IP such as designs, trademarks and domain names.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website has more features than most other patenting authorities. It allows exact phrase and field searching (e.g., searching by assignee name, application number, etc.) and also utilises nested Boolean logic (e.g., pet and (food or feed)), in addition to truncation (e.g., ignoring characters after a stem to pick up normal plurals and similar variants). The 'manual search' option allows a very sophisticated search statement to be formed, and the entire patent can be viewed and printed as a single screen, rather than a page.

The Trilateral Website, incorporating the USPTO, the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and the (European Patent Office) EPO, features the First Page Data Base, which contains the bibliographic information normally found on the first page of a patent or application.

Espacenet allows field searching, nested Boolean logic and truncation of the EPO and PCT (so-called WO patent documents) and of many of the member countries, but you will have to drill down to find the advanced features. Each country's patent collection is found at http://CC.espacenet.com where CC stands for the two letter abbreviation for the country. It is possible to search and view the front page information of UK patents, patents issued by the EPO (European Patent Office), those issued by individual European patenting authorities (in the original language and one country at a time), and PCT patents all as far back as the previous 24 months. Worldwide and Japanese patents can also be searched, although the site does not state the range of years available.

Countries are at http://www.european-patent office.org/espacenet.info/access.htm. This site also list the websites that are in English, which include the patent offices of Cyprus, Ireland, Liechtenstein and the United Kingdom.

PCT (Patent Co-Operation Treaty) information is searchable but access is limited to only the contents of the first page data from 1997 to date, though it is possible to view the rest of the document.

Canadian patents feature basic and advanced searching in both English and French.

Japanese Patent Office This allows you to search the Patent Abstracts of Japan database (in English). The archive goes back to 1993 and allows the bibliographic data, abstract, drawing and legal status information to be viewed

Other patenting authorities are making progress in developing accessible records via their websites, as well as commercial companies making reasonable levels of patent information available free of charge.

IBM/IP Network is a database provided by IBM and allows very sophisticated Boolean field searching for US patents dating back to 1971. Recently, European patents have been introduced from 1979, as have PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents from 1997. A major feature of this site is that it is possible to view and print a scanned image of the entire patent, and this includes the drawings. The only limitation to this is that you must load and print each page of the patent individually, which can be time consuming. It is also necessary to alter the browser margins to print the patent in its entirety.

QPAT-US is a full text database of all US patents, this time those issued since 1974. Although users must pay a subscription to view the full text, it is free to search the front page information, as long as you register and choose a username and password. The advantage it has over the IBM/IP Network is that many different search sets can be created and then combined in different ways to perform a powerful search.

The Patent Information User's Group is a body of patent searchers around the world who can answer questions about finding obscure documents or how to find and interpret patent information. This site also contains links to many patent and related websites.

A great source of information can be found at the Intellectual Property Mall section of the Franklin Pierce Law Centre website where access to most patent websites can be found.

Should you bother?

Yes, by all means. If you go through the process of inventing a product, process, or device, if you come up with a great new name or slogan, or if you write a company document, spending the time to protect it can save your company's products or name and a great deal of legal trouble. Doing some of the preliminary research yourself can save a lot of money compared to having a patent specialist handle the entire process.

The Internet makes the research very easy.

Overall, access to much of the world's patent information can be found on the Internet, and a reasonable search is possible, as long as consideration is made for each authorities' collection of documents, search engine, and peculiarities of the patent system.