Research Guides: Find Patents and Standards: Patent Details

About Patents

The United States Patent and Trademark Office issues patents to protect an inventor's exclusive right to profit from his or her own ideas. For a fixed, non renewable period of time, the inventor can exclude all others from making, using, or selling the invention without authorization. To receive a patent, an invention must be new and useful or significantly different from previous inventions of its type. The government currently issues three types of patents: utility, design, and plant patents. To learn more, see these pages from USPTO:

Process for Obtaining a Utility Patent
Patent Basics
Types of Patent Applications
Anatomy of a U.S. Patent
Frequently Asked Questions
Patent Statistics
Access to trends such as yearly number of patents by organization or industry or by geographic region. For an example of the information available see metropolitan Richmond, VA patents by organization, 2006-2010, http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/cbsa_asg/140060_asg.htm

Patents @ VCU

VCU Intellectual Property Policy
"In order to protect the rights of the creators and the University, prior to public disclosure, University Members are required to report all Intellectual Property in which the University may claim an interest." For full details, see the policy.
TechTransfer and Ventures
This VCU office has disclosure forms and provides assistance with patenting and commercialization of VCU inventions

U.S. Patent Searches

How to Conduct a Preliminary Patent Search
Narrated slide show from the USPTO that describes how to conduct a preliminary patent search.
USPTO Patent Public Search
Searches USPAT (full-text U.S. patents back to 1970 and classification and patent number searching to 1790) and USOCR (OCR scanned pre-1970 U.S. patents - full text but sometimes character recognition / spelling is unreliable), and US-PGPUB (U.S. pre-grant applications to 3/2001).
Patent Classification
Identify the formal terms that describe patents. Use these classification terms in a formal search. Look for the overview of the classification system and the index of classification terms. Please note even if you end up using the Quick Search, some work with the classification system will be extremely helpful for identifying the best search terms.
Patent to PDF
Given the patent number, get the document in pdf.
Process for Obtaining a Utility Patent

International IP

World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
European Patent Office
Japan Patent Office
Korean Intellectual Property Office
Five IP Offices
European Patent Office, Japan Patent Office, Korean Intellectual Property Office,
State Intellectual Property Office of the People's Republic of China, and
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Directory of Intellectual Property Offices
From the WIPO links to intellectual property offices around the world.