Google Extends Patent Search To Prior Art

mikejuk writes "As well as buying up patents to defend itself against the coming Apple attack on Android, Google is also readying its own technology. It has extended its Patent Search facility to include European patents and has added a Prior Art facility. The new Prior Art facility seems to be valuable both to inventors and to the legal profession. In order to be granted a patent the inventor has to establish that it is a novel idea — and in the current litigious environment companies and their lawyers might want to show that patents should not have been granted."

Comments

Doesn't Matter

[wbr1]

In order to be granted a patent the inventor has to establish that it is a novel idea — and in the current litigious environment companies and their lawyers might want to show that patents should not have been granted.

Can someone explain how this matters when google is 1) Not the patent office, and 2) the courts blatantly ignore prior art anyway?

It seems to me that you can patent just about anything now with the right wording and money.

I am filing a patent on "Upright Locomotion for Bipedal Hominids using Two Appendages."

Re:Doesn't Matter

[twistedcubic]

"Can someone explain how this matters when google is 1) Not the patent office, and 2) the courts blatantly ignore prior art anyway?"

It's not that the courts ignore prior art, but that they defer to the patent office. If the courts have to determine whether a patent is valid, what's the point of having a patent office? The proper place to challenge the validity of a patent is at the Patent Office, first, and then the courts if you think you might get lucky.

You know how that ends...

[Anonymous Coward]

...something like this.

That's a good strategy

[HalAtWork]

Google has never been a fan of the patent wars. If Google sets up a search engine for prior art, they will be providing a resource with which many patents can be invalidated. Competitors will fear bias in that the prior art database may give results that are in Google's favor, and perhaps start providing resources that index prior art themselves. Hopefully the whole thing will snowball and show the failure of the current system. However if doubt would be cast on the quality and validity of the results then perhaps nobody will pay attention to this initiative.

Pssh nice prior art dude

[cratermoon]

The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there.

Re:Pssh nice prior art dude

[cratermoon]

A method "obvious to a person that is well-versed in an art" is not supposed to be patentable either. Except Apple added "on a mobile phone", and THEN, well, it changed everything!

Re:Why bother?

[SourceFrog]

What patent law has effectively become, in practice, is a law against inventing (for anyone except the the big entrenched players.)

what could possibly go wrong

[zrelativity]

Prior arts are patents also, and they may not have expired.

Let Google engineers go do Prior Art Search, or lookup prior patents and start developing in those area.

Even better is that Google keep a history of such search results performed by their engineers.

When they are sued for patent infringement, and asked to handover the search results, it would be fun to watch.

As an engineer, the advice I have always received, "Do not do any patent or prior art search". Leave that to the lawyer. Avoid getting tainted. Avoid doing what Samsung been caught doing.