Intellectual Property Resources | Hyra IP

Resources

Patents101, www.patents101.com:

Patents101 is an intellectual property law blog sponsored by Hyra IP with a focus on small businesses and inventors. Posts answer questions frequently asked by clients about patents, trademarks, copyrights, and other topics. Here you may find the answer to a question you have been wondering about, or you may stumble upon an important question you have not thought to ask. If you have a general question related to intellectual property law (not concerning any particular application), contact me and it may be selected for answering on Patents101.

United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), www.uspto.gov:

The website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) contains a wealth of information regarding the patent and trademark application processes.

The USPTO’s patent information includes:

• Basic information about patents
• Information about how to obtain a patent
• USPTO contact information

If you are a fast reader, browse the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP). At 3,000+ pages in length, it contains answers to most of the questions you might have about the patent examination process.

The USPTO’s trademarks information includes:

• Basic information on trademarks and the trademark registration process
• The Trademark Manual of Examination Procedures (TMEP)

United States Copyright Office, www.copyright.gov:

The best source of information on United States copyrights and the copyright registration process.

Google Patents, www.google.com/patents:

Google Patents is a free patent search directory based on the PTO patent database. Its strength is its powerful keywork search ability, which is lacking in the search page on the USPTO website. In fact, the keyword search ability of Google Patents is in many ways superior even to the search program used by the PTO Examiners and available to the public only at the Public Search Facility in Alexandria, VA. However, the Google database has some errors and is missing some documents, and is also limited to U.S. patents, so it cannot be considered a complete patent searching solution.