Patent Resources on the Web and in the Engineering Library

The new (as of 2022) patent search tool from the USPTO. It covers US granted patents and patent applications from 1836 to present, although older patents have fewer searchable pieces of information. This replaces the PatFT, AppFT, PubEAST, and PubWEST search tools.

This is a brief one-page guide to patentability searching. It is focused on USPTO databases.

This free and open database of international patents has a modern search interface and offers some unique patent searching tools, notably gene sequence searching.

This database features Google's easy-to-use search interface, but Google's search algorithm can be inconsistent when dealing with legal-technical patent language. You can use it for doing a first pass when patentability searching, but make sure to use other resources as well.

This European Patent Office (EPO) database has international coverage and includes an excellent Cooperative Patent Classifcation (CPC) search tool. Patent information is provided by more than 82 patent-granting organizations. Machine translations are available for many languages. Espacenet also does an excellent job of making connections between patent filings in different countries, identifying "patent families" that share claims.

This World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) database searches international Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications.

This is the Canadian Intellectual Patent Office database for Canadian patents.

This is the Japanese Patent Office (JPO)'s search tool. It contains machine translations from Japanese to English (use the DETAIL option).

Lists countries and website links. Some sites have an English version.

KIPRIS is South Korea's patent search tool, and is available in English.

PAIR is a tool for finding public, but not easily accessible, information about patents and patent applications. You can see all of the legal filings, supporting documents, and correspondence between an inventor and a patent examiner for a given document.

Who owns the rights to a given patent? If the individual or organization to whom the rights to the patent have been assigned is change after it's published, that data is recorded here.

This database contains gene sequence data associated with specific patents. Search by document number and date.