When you have made a new invention and want to apply for a patent, in order to reduce the risk of being notified of reasons for rejection of novelty and inventive step in the examination, it is recommended that you conduct a search before filing an application to see if there are any similar inventions that have been published in the past. However, excluding special technical fields, even if you limit yourself to Japan, there are a huge number of documents that have been published in the past. It is very difficult to find prior art documents that could be used as reasons for rejection. If you are looking for similar documents, it is enough to find one, but if you are looking for documents that do not exist, there is no end to it. It is the so-called “the devil’s proof”.
It is impossible to conduct a prior art search 100% without omissions and to obtain 100% certainty that a patent can be obtained. However, it is also the same for the examiner who examines patent applications: it is a “devil’s proof”. Therefore, it is considered that the basic approach is to first investigate the range that the examiner is likely to find. If you can quickly find prior art documents that could be cited as reasons for rejection by searching J-PlatPat, you should probably change your application strategy. If you can’t find any prior art documents even if you search within a certain range of search conditions, you might as well try filing an application and taking the challenge of obtaining a patent.
Infringement prevention searches to determine whether the products that your company plans to manufacture and sell may infringe on the patent rights of other companies are also a “devil’s proof”. If the country in which you plan to manufacture and sell is Japan only, the scope of the infringement prevention search will be limited to existing valid patent gazettes and patent publication gazettes that are currently under examination and may become patents in the future. However, you need to be careful not to overlook documents that include some of the features of the products you plan to implement in the technical scope.
If you have any requests for patent searches, please contact us. (Conan)