Beyond patent families

Abstract

Beyond patent families, there are other closely interrelated patents and patent applications. Firms who wish to be active in a particular area of technology need to ensure that their products will not infringe existing patents or existing patent applications which might later be granted. This requires an adequate patent search to uncover all interrelated patents and applications. Frequently, interrelated patents and applications are from a single applicant, but often with multiple inventors, or sets of inventors, and concern similar, but not identical subject-matter. The challenge is to identify such relationships between patents and applications, as distinct from other relationships such as citations or patent families, which may include divisional applications. This paper presents simple-to-use but effective techniques which anyone can apply, using freely available data, to retrieve such related applications. The techniques are based on the applicant name, inventors and titles. Additional possibilities derive from the application number, priority dates and classes. These techniques are based on ones used at the European Patent Office to find similar applications at the pre-search stage, techniques which have proven their value in widespread systematic use for over twenty years using tools the Office has developed. Compared to existing techniques such as patent landscaping, the techniques proposed here are simpler to use, quicker and less expensive. Examples from various fields of technology will be presented using Espacenet.