The purpose of a validity or an invalidity / opposition search is to understand the strength of a patent, i.e., whether or not the patent is defendable in a court if litigation arises. Such a search is done for several reasons to understand the strength of a patent that you are planning to acquire, to understand if a patent standing in your way is really defensible, to protect your own position in case someone has accused you of infringement, and so on. Doing a validity search would give you strategic advantage over competition. SciTech Patent Art’s scientists are experts in validity searches. We bring both technical expertise and knowledge of databases / tools available to your project and help you find a way out of some of the toughest IP issues. SciTech Patent Art has received commendations from many clients over the years for finding precise prior art. SciTech Patent Art scientists have also received accolades in global search competitions for their search skills.
Our Methodology for an Invalidation Search:
SciTech Patent Art adopts a unique and unconventional process towards invalidation searches that involves human experts and is powered by Deep Web & AI / ML tools.
Searches for invalidity and validity are primarily concerned with finding prior art that was not retrieved by patent examiners during prosecution using conventional search techniques.
The conventional approach includes keyword searches, classification searches, author/inventor name searches, and citation searches. Conventional approaches that cover all data sources generally result in several references if an in-depth search is conducted.
In order to find such prior art, we need to take a different (or unconventional) approach. An unconventional approach begins by identifying areas where there is a greater likelihood of prior art being discovered.
- The first step involves an analysis of preliminary search results and the searcher’s experience is used to identify pockets of information.
- The next step requires to dig deeper into those pockets of information. There are, however, many unindexed or hidden pages that prevent popular search engines from digging into all the pertinent data. At this stage, the use of AI/ML and deep-web solutions is very helpful as they are very efficient at retrieving almost all the required information even from unindexed or hidden pages.
The following are the ways to identify pockets/hot-spots of information:
- Identify and search for novel aspect of claims that define the underlaying invention.
- Review family patents as an applicant may file patents in multiple jurisdictions of interest
- Citation search of patents and non-patent literatures data
- Identify specific Universities/ Institutes, companies or authors/ inventors
- Comprehensive Deep Web searches with AI/ML and proprietary crawling solutions
SciTech Patent Art has a unique unconventional approach to find compelling invalidating prior art.
