Experts advise product developers to conduct a patent search before approaching the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for protection of their intellectual property. A patent search allows the inventor to further explore his options at a much lesser financial risk, usually between $400 to $1,500, depending on how the search is conducted. Online patent search services are gaining popularity as both a time- and cost-saving alternative for the preliminary investigation of patent specifications.

The IBM Intellectual Property Network was among the first of such services, allowing the user to inspect more than 27 years of U.S. patents, including more than 1.4 million international patents and applications. More recently, MicroPatent expanded its service market by introducing PatSearch FullText, the first full-text patent database to include patent specifications of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

MicroPatent's database includes patents from the United States, Europe and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), as well as abstracts from Japan. This new service, which is free to users, supports cross-database and proximity searching, results sorting and manipulation, keyword searching and highlighting, and report generation. PatSearch FullText searches can be conducted on the full patent specification, the claims or the title/abstract.

"We are pleased to be the first to offer a searchable PCT full-text patent database to researchers around the world. Users will benefit from our system, which allows the simultaneous searching of US, EP and PCT full-text patent document collections," notes Steve Wolfson, President of MicroPatent. "We think that the biggest plus for our users is that by searching the full-patent specification, they will pick up essential detail and documents not discoverable by searching abstracts alone. This is at the heart of patentability, infringement research and development of new products," says Wolfson.

"This full-text database will be very helpful to inventors as well as researchers," says Joanne Hayes-Rines, editor of Inventors' Digest. "The more information a person can access when trying to determine if his or her invention is novel and unique, the better their potential for success." Tom Mosley, author of "Marketing Your Invention," says the retrieval of drawings is the best part of the new MicroPatent database. "The main drawing seems to come right up as opposed to drawings in IBM's database, which take 'forever' to load," he explains.

But Mosley says online-search systems do have their disadvantages and suggests the cautious inventor may still be better off using traditional methods.

"As a general rule, I would recommend inventors who are trying to determine whether to file a patent pay for a professional search, hire an attorney to interpret it, draft the paperwork, write the claims, and duke it out with the examiner," says Mosley. He adds that class codes are especially important in a patent search. "Doing a key-word search in a full-text database is simply not accurate enough to justify spending $5,000 to $10,000 for patent work. If an inventor wants to perform a patent search for his or her own edification or to stimulate creativity, I still think the best way is to visit the closest patent depository."

Meanwhile, the USPTO is currently testing its own online patent-search service set to include their complete database by 2001.

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