Validity searches

Suppose your company has become aware of a patent application or granted patent that you infringe or may infringe in the future. In such an instance, you might want to have the granted patent invalidated, or to prevent the patent application from being granted at all.

To achieve this, you need documentation showing that the invention was already known to the public at the time of filing of the patent application. A validity search is directed at finding such documentation. By the very nature of the search, it is restricted to all documentation publicly available prior to the application and/or the earliest invoked priority date of the patent or patent application concerned.

A validity search can cost a lot of time to conclude. Often, it won't be easy to find documentation that the relevant patent office wasn't already able to find. Therefore, it is important for NPS to know what your time and budget constraints are prior to starting the search. Naturally, it is also possible to phase the search and to discuss the intermediate results after each phase. Subsequently, it can be decided whether, how and to what point further searching is viable.