IMPORTANCE OF PAID PATENT DATABASES OVER FREE PATENT DATABASES
Patent search and analysis has become mandatory from big corporate to small companies to develop their business, set up there market position and to have a thorough learning of their competitors. Patent search and analysis can be done using two types of databases, i.e., public database and paid databases. Public database are generally freely available database, where you need not subscribe or pay to access to access the database. However, conducting searches in freely available databases has many limitations with respect to limitations of search options, quality of data retrieved, downloading of bulk data for analysis, whereas the paid patent databases produce excellent in-depth result over the free databases by retrieving required prior art data within short duration of time.
Limitations of Public/Free Patent Databases
Freely available patent databases provide only few search fields. Even, the search cannot be made according to various bibliographic fields too. Further, in many of the free database, the search option is available through Keywords in Bibliographic fields, or sometimes even limited to searching into Abstract through keywords. How a search for legal purposes can be complete through that search? For legal purposes, a depth search is required in full body of description, as novelty and patentability cannot be determined against a patent document, till the time whole document is not scanned. Further, a freedom to operate search is incomplete till the time all the independent claims are searched analyzed. An invalidity search is incomplete till the time all the claims of a patent document is invalidated. Further, the searching and ranking algorithms are not as up-to-date in a free database, as they are in the paid database, generally this effects quality of data retrieved, speed of retrieval, quality of analysis and other such aspects while using free database. Free patent databases operate with limitation to jurisdictions; hence one can retrieve data only from specific country. Free patent database tools doesn’t possess translator and lacks natural language processing capacity.
To sum up, the free database have the below limitations and difficulties:
- Algorithm Limitations,
- Limitations and Restrictions in using Boolean and Operators,
- Limitations in downloading required Patent documents,
- Not user friendly,
- No translation support,
- Data limited to one or few jurisdictions only,
- More irrelevance data results as output.
Need Paid Patent Database – Why??
Big companies and corporate are always keen to extend their boundary of business, therefore they are very cautious about patent litigation, inturn they prefer patent analysis to know the current status of their product in particular jurisdiction. R&D institutions, Universities, SMEs, MSMEs and IP firms also opt for patent analysis to study about the status of their invention. Search Engines of paid patent database cater these people with elaborate search result and gives valuable suggestion to proceed further in their invention and business with less time consumption.
Specific Features of Paid Patent Databases
Paid patent databases are much preferred than free databases as they produce reliable results with good quality. Paid databases have numerous features compared to free databases; few of them are given below:
Patent family search
Search engines of paid patent databases are designed to search patent families of various technical domains which are published in different patent offices and produce a detailed report with full description and legal status; this saves time from searching each and every IPO websites.
Translator
Paid patent databases provide translator option for translating the non-English text to English text and to other required language. For some analysis the inbuilt translator provide excellent result within short duration of time with no efforts.
Words with case difference
Usually the search engine is not case sensitive, may terms in technical domains have case change nature such as cDNA, this cause confusion over normal words, therefore paid patent database tools have specific operators option over free databases to obtain exact technical term.
Charts
Paid patent database tools have facilities to prepare charts to have knowledge about patent family details, patent landscape analysis, IP Portfolio Management Life Cycle of companies or corporate and many more within short duration of time with quality results.
Global Data Coverage
The search engines of paid patent databases have been designed to search data globally without any restriction, thus one can find relevant patent document published by IPO of different countries and can easily download the relevant patent document.
Advanced analytical features
Paid patent databases possess many more analytical features such as technological landscape analysis, multilingual search option, IP portfolio life cycle management etc.
Comparative chart with Special Elements
| Special elements | Free Patent database | Paid Patent Database |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance and retrieval of past search history | No | Yes |
| Language Translator | No | Yes |
| Citation search feature | No | Yes |
| Claim Chart Preparation | No | Yes |
| Patent timeline or history analysis | No | Yes |
| Patent Publication alerts | No | Yes |
| Advanced Algorithm | No | Yes |
| Visual graphics based feature | No | Yes |
Acquire the benefits of paid patent databases – How??
Paid patent databases have huge benefits over free patent databases. They save much time, effort and money when compared to free database. Paid patent databases are accessed using their respective websites with member login access. Some database tools have free trial option to practice and specific manual guide to learn about the features, these options help to know more about the database and facilitate to operate the search engine more easily.
