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I don't understand why the patent examiner wouldn't look into something like Google Scholar for prior art. This is the "unpatented database" where people submit
by esalman 8y ago
I don't understand why the patent examiner wouldn't look into something like Google Scholar for prior art. This is the "unpatented database" where people submit inventions all the time- journal articles, preprints etc.
- epmaybe 8y agoIf I understand correctly, the us patent system is "first to file" rather than "first to invent". There's a 1yr grace period from when an inventor publicly discloses an invention (say, in an academic journal) to when they must file a patent application. See this link for more details: https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/first-to-file-a-primer/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/first-to-file-a-primer/
- patentatt 8y agoExaminers do absolutely use NPL (non-patent literature) sources such as an including Google Scholar. Just because this one examiner in this case didn't include any record in the file wrapper also doesn't mean that they didn't conduct a search there themselves. But the evidence we're talking about here may not have even come up in a Google Scholar search as it appears it is only on a crowd funding page.