Patent invalidation is a crucial task for those patent holders or companies, which are suffering from infringement charges with other competitive patent holders or third parties. Generally patent invalidation is used to invalidate the pre-existing patents. It helps to uncover invalid facts (or claims) of the pre-existing patents and publications.
All those above mentioned results are possible only through the exhaustive prior art search of that particular patent or claim by using priority date (in USPTO) as a standard filter.
Creative strategies for proof-reading patent invalidation
1. Usage of varying combinations of Precision and Accuracy in their query building keywords
- If we are searching a prior art for single claim, then precision and accuracy both should be high in our self-created keywords. Because if we have any other combination of precision and accuracy in our self-keywords like low precision-high accuracy, then the chances of errors in our result will increase.
- For more than one claim, the precision in our keywords should be low and accuracy should be high. The reason is that we need to focus at various claims or areas of that particular invention with some more exhaustiveness.
2. Usage of "Theory of independent assortment" concept to proof-read a patent invalidation search
- The prior art search should be done by two or more researchers independently at a same time, because humans possess multi-dimensions in their creative thinking. Because, for one researcher it is not so easy to cover all relevant area of that particular claim or drawing in a small time.
- For final invalidation report, merge all the independent results and try to sort out a single best suited result.
3. Some other important strategies
- Try to make some suitable categories or orders of nearly related patents or claims according to their extent of similarity with the concerned one i.e. patent or claim or drawing. For example, highly related, moderately related, least related etc.
- Enhance the systematic background knowledge search of active or expired patents from all possible databases including patent and non-patent literature both.
- All important factors like terrain information of particular patent, priority date, specificity of concerned claim or drawing etc., should be kept in mind during the prior art search.
When we handle a patent invalidation case, time consumption predicts more value in prior art search. These creative methods are advantageous to make a more effective and better proof-read patent invalidation reports. Therefore, always try to use advanced techniques and better resources during the prior art search.
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