Patent Invalidation Searches
Patent invalidity/validity searches are conducted to either validate the claims made by a patent or to invalidate one or more claims of a competitor’s patent. Patent invalidation search is the first step taken by a company when faced with a patent infringement lawsuit. In the patent Invalidation searches, we generally identify prior arts or other evidence that was not considered during the original patent examination process but could potentially invalidate one or more claims of the patent.
Validity searches are conducted to check the strength of a granted patent while exploring the available licensing options. The validity searches are performed after the grant of a patent to ensure that the granted patent is valid and enforceable. On the other hand, Invalidity searches are conducted by a defendant to invalidate a patent by conducting prior art search.
Key objective
The key objective of the validity and invalidity search is to find out prior art that was likely missed by the patent examiner during the prosecution stage, which may potentially question the novelty or non-obviousness of the reference. An invalidity/validity search involves conducting a thorough patent and non-patent literature search to identify prior art references before the earliest filing date of the patent.
Our Best Practices
- We perform exhaustive prior art search in patent and non-patent databases.
- The search strategy includes various strategies such as keyword based searching, classification based searching (such as CPC, IPC, USC, FI, F-term), Assignee based searching, inventor based searching, and citation based searching.
- We use various patent and non-patent databases for the search. The patent databases include Thomson Innovation, Orbit (from QuestelTM), Google Patents, Espacenet, or USPTO. The other national and non-patent databases such as IP.com, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, CiteSeer, ACM Library, Wiley’s Library, etc.
- Our report includes details of prior arts with their relevant mapping.
- Accurately identifying the novel aspect of the patent based on specifications and file rapper analysis
- Validating the prior art as per the 35 USC laws (102/103) and EPC laws (Articles 54 and 56)