LibGuides: Biomedical Engineering: Patents

WHAT IS A PATENT?

USPTO: Information about Patents
Information from the United States Patent and Trademark Office website regarding patents, such as types of patents, patent process, patent classification, statistics, patent laws and regulations etc.

DEFINITION: A form of protection that provides a person or legal entity with exclusive rights for making, using or selling a concept or invention and excludes others from doing the same for the duration of the patent.

A patent is a grant of protection for an invention. It's granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and has a term of 14 to 20 years. Owning a patent gives you the right to stop someone else from making, using or selling your invention without your permission.

FIND PATENTS

US Patent & Trademark Office - Patent Searching
Covers US patents issued from 1790 to the most recent weekly issue date. See the USPTO website for important notices concerning the database.
Google Patents
All patents available through Google Patents (from 1790 through the present) come from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. You can search the full text of U.S. patents from the Google Patents homepage, or visit the Advanced Patents search page to search by criteria like patent number, inventor, and filing date. Images are also available. As with Google Web Search, the results are ranked according to their relevance to a given search. query. Covers patents and applications from USPTO and EPO.
How to conduct a preliminary U.S. patent search