LexisNexis TotalPatent One® is a one-stop shop for design patent searches that can make things quicker and easier.
Designers, artists, companies, and anyone who produces an aesthetically pleasing product should consider design patents. While utility patents protect the “usefulness” of an item, design patents protect an item’s non-functional, ornamental appearance. A design patent may help protect a product even if it is ineligible for a utility patent, and, because utility patents and design patents offer different forms of patent protection, inventors may be able to obtain both utility patents and design patents for a single item. Wielding dual patents broadens the scope of patent protection beyond what either a utility or design patent could offer alone.
Businesses launching a new product need to know whether their product is infringing any patented designs before sales begin, and designers may be curious about whether their designs meet patentability requirements; a thorough design patent search can help answer both of those questions. Searching for valid patents granted in a specific geographic territory is encouraged to help determine whether a particular design is free to use without infringing a valid design patent, but establishing a design’s patentability calls for a broader search for similar designs anywhere in the world. In either scenario, having access to today’s best patent search tools makes performing a design patent search quicker and easier than ever.
There are several patent databases to assist in design patent searches, including Google Patents, the USPTO website, the WIPO patent search database, and the EPO patent search database. TotalPatent One® gives you access to over 110,000,000 patent documents from over 107 patent authorities from a single patent search platform. The TotalPatent One patent database is a one-stop shop for design patent searches, and it eliminates the need to use more than one search tool to access patents from all over the world.
Design images should be easily accessible throughout patent searches so that designs can quickly be accessed. Many platforms present search results with patent information, such as a patent number and title, but fail to provide users with a visual. TotalPatent One users can view their results with a hybrid of information and images or in a convenient image grid view to enable efficient patent record analysis.
Good patent searches arise from thorough investigation and proper record keeping. TotalPatent One enables users to save and arrange relevant search results in online portfolios for convenient access and organization. Patent records can also be saved and printed individually, or user-selected information can be exported in a variety of formats (including CSV, Excel, Word, PDF, and HTML) that incorporate clippings of design patent images.
TotalPatent One patent searches are the fastest and most convenient way to determine design patent infringement and patentability. Patent search results are only as good as the platform that produced them, and TotalPatent One was designed with design patents in mind.
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