It is often easy to identify major players which hold a significant patent portfolio in an industry. Sometimes, you may want to analyze patent portfolio of a particular company. Further, sometimes you may wish to know a product which employs a certain technology. And, thus you need to find the corresponding patent for that technology. In such cases, an assignee search comes handy.
It is very important to search about the company before beginning an assignee search. This is so in order to identify name changes, ownership and subsidiary relationship with its parent holding, etc. This information can be retrieved from the company’s website, or general Google search. Sometimes, more specialized business database may be needed that contain company listings and information.
Points to consider while performing Assignee Search
Following are some points to consider while performing an assignee search:
- You should consider all variant forms of the inventor’s name if you are looking for an individual as an assignee.
- Consider name variations of its different subsidiaries if you are looking for an organization as an assignee.
- You should also consider all possible translations and transliterations of the names and/or terms involved.
- You should search under all the names even beyond the date of the name change if the company has changed names. Sometimes, patents filed before the name change are issued later and may contain the previous company name as the assignee.
- Sometimes the name of the company might be in the “representative,” “agent,” or “correspondent” field of the patent. You should include these fields in your search as well.
- You should check national patent office’s legal status register for some countries, to search for assignee name.
Strategies to simplify Assignee Search
Below are some of the strategies that can be used in order to simplify assignee search:
- You should use a database (generally paid, like Thomson Innovation). This normalizes all name variants of the assignee name in your search string. Some databases even use automation tools to standardize assignee names. It can prove to be a good idea to use such tools for crucial search projects.
- You should familiarize yourself with indexing methodology of the database that you may use. Because all database indexes are not created with a similar scheme. Accordingly, you should modify your search string.
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