FreePatentsOnline.com is a free site for searching US Patents, US Published Applications, and European Patents. The search engine uses a syntax similar to the USPTO search site and adds powerful extensions such as word stemming, proximity searching, and search term weighting.
The US Patent and Trademark Office occasionally conducts live on-line chats to answer questions and offer tips to independent inventors. Inventors may also find useful information on the USPTO Inventor Resources page.
Links: transcripts of chats, index of chat topics.
The Cooperative Research and Technology Enhancement Act amends 35 U.S.C. 103( c ) to provide that subject matter developed by another person shall be treated as owned by the same person or subject to an obligation of assignment to the same person for purposes of determining obviousness if three conditions are met: (1) The claimed invention was made by or on behalf of parties to a joint research agreement that was in effect on or before the date the claimed invention was made; (2) the claimed invention was made as a result of activities undertaken within the scope of the joint research agreement; and (3) the application for patent for the claimed invention discloses or is amended to disclose the names of the parties to the joint research agreement.
Russ Krajec, in his Anything Under the Sun blog, states that “[c]lear, concise writing is difficult to learn and difficult to practice.” Some patent attorneys “go to great lengths to seemingly make their patent applications almost impossible to read. This hurts the applicant in many ways.” The IP Litigation Blog suggests that patent prosecutors deliberately use convoluted language. Krajec counters that such language is actually the result of patent drafters having “only a cursory understanding of the technology.” He continues, “[d]rafting a clear, concise patent application is one of the most difficult tasks in the legal field. It is much more easy (and lazy) to write a cluttered and confusing application that uses all the buzzwords but doesn’t paint a clear picture.”
