This document discusses patent prior art searches and trademark searches. It defines a patent as an intellectual property granted to an inventor for a new, useful, and non-obvious idea, and a trademark as an exclusive sign identifying a particular product or service. It describes prior art searches as searches of all publicly available information related to a patent claim's originality, conducted to ensure the invention is new and non-obvious. The document outlines different types of prior art searches and notes that trademark searches are carried out through government trademark databases and can be interpreted by attorneys.

1. PATENT PRIOR ART
SEARCH AND
TRADEMARK SEARCH

2. PATENT AND TRADEMARK
 Patent – an intellectual property granted to an
inventor of any new, useful, non – obvious idea by
the government
 Trademark – an exclusive sign, expression or
design identifying a particular product or service

3. PATENT PRIOR ART SEARCH
 Prior art – all information in any form related to
a patent’s claim of originality that has been
made available to the public before a given
date
 Also called state-of-the-art
 conducted to ensure the invention is ‘new’ and
‘non-obvious’
 important step in patent granting procedure

4. BENEFITS
 makes the inventor aware about any pre-
existing knowledge closely related to his
invention
 gives him an insight about the kind of research
already done in that field.

5. TYPES OF PRIOR ART
SEARCHES
 novelty search: conducted by professionals before
a patent application is filed for, ensures the ‘
newness’ of the invention by searching into patent
databases, utility models and scientific literature.
 Validity search: conducted after a patent is
issued, to declare a patent invalid if the patent
examiner overlooked any information during the
prior art search
 Clearance search: to check if an issued patent
violates an existing patent and if so, a validity
search is conducted again.

6. CROWDSOURCING
 Popular method of prior art search where
references are difficult to find.
 interested people form a forum on an online
platform and conduct the search.

7. TRADEMARK SEARCH
 Carried out through databases of registered
trademarks maintained by governments
 Search reports interpreted by licensed
attorneys
 by third party databases like
LexisNexis, Dialog, Compu-Mark
 Also by private databases and classification
systems like the Vienna Classification