Patent and Trade Office

Another agency of the federal government that employs organic chemists is the Patent and Trade Office, which distributes ballpoint pens as recruiting aids. The barrels and pocket clips give the toll-free job line number (1-800-642-5670) and Web address (www.uspto.gov). 

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The need to defend paper examples arises rarely because few patents interfere with other grants. According to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, about... 

To establish that your prospective supervisor and coworkers do publish their research, ask for copies of their publication lists, which should cite articles they wrote and the patents granted them. These lists demonstrate how often those scientists publish, while their articles and patents show that the results they report were obtained at the company where they work. The Author Indices of Chemical Abstracts also furnish this information. If you visit the Web site of the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (www.uspto.gov), you can search the Bibliographic Database by an inventor s surname to find the patents granted her. 

U.S. Patent and Trade Office Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research... 

Commerce Department Commerce Census Bureau, economics, trade. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Patent and Trademark Office... 

The U.S. Patent and Trade Mark Office (USPTO) database (http //patft.uspto.gov/) provides access to granted U.S. patents from 1976 and patent applications from March 2001. Patents can be viewed as text documents (without structures or diagrams) or as single-page images of the original document in TIFF format. Patents prior to 1976 and back to 1790 are available as TIFF images only. 

United States Patent and Trade Mark Office Manual of Patent Examination Practices http //www. uspto.gov/web/offices /pac/mpep/mpep.htm. 

Pending issuance of the patent, an applicant may maintain the information in the application as a trade secret. Until the patent issues, the Patent and Trademark Office keeps all information about the patent application secret. 35 U.S.C. 122. Applications are not available to the public or to other inventors. However, once the patent issues, the application and supporting documents, as well as Patent and Trademark Office action on the application, are filed in the Patent and Trademark Office search room. Such disclosure ends trade secret protection over the disclosed information. 

In some situations, companies may be reluctant to distribute products without a patent. For example, a company may own a new chemical compound that is useful in its own industrial processes, which it would sell for use by the general public if it could retain its proprietary right in the chemical. However, if the chemical is readily analyzable, distribution would destroy the company s trade secret rights. Lack of a patent therefore is impeding sale of the product. The Patent and Trademark Office rules provide that, where lack of a patent is preventing distribution of a product, a patent applicant may apply to have its application made special and expedited. 

It is important for companies to keep the patent system in mind, whether or not they choose to seek patents for their own products. When technical personnel create useful products or processes that seem to them to be significant advances on the prior art, the assistance of patent counsel very often becomes useful. First, companies need to determine whether use or sale of these new processes or products might infringe someone else s patent. This may involve a search of the relevant records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (and of the patent offices of any foreign countries where the products may be used or marketed). Second, if the product seems to technical personnel to be novel and significant of the art, companies may want to consider whether to apply for a patent. In such a situation, a search should be made at the Patent and Trademark Office to determine whether the invention seems likely to be patentable. How extensive a search should be before a patent application is filed, as well as the decision whether to seek a patent at all, may depend upon how valuable the invention seems. For a very important item, patent lawyers may also conduct searches of the relevant trade literature to see whether the invention has been anticipated but not patented. Some companies monitor the... 

US Patent and Trade Marks Office. U.S. patent activity calendar years 1790 to the present. http //www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h counts.pdf. 2012. 

There is a considerable amount of literature dealing with hexaarylbiimidazoles (HABIs). References to these compounds were found in over 130 journal articles as shown in Chemical Abstracts (CA) there were about 1050 patents abstracted in Chemical Abstracts. Most significantly, a very large database exists in the issued (over 1200) and applied patents (over 500) that can be examined on the U.S. Patent and Trade Mark Office website. Several chapters in survey books describe various aspects of HABI Chemistry. 

It is generally agreed that there should be some change in the law to facilitate public participation in the patent examination process. This is a result of the growing volume of the scientific literature and the increasing complexity of the sources to be searched. A person who knows of reasons why a patent should not have issued should be able to bring these reasons before the Patent Office, and the Patent Office should reexamine the patent and review its prior decision. These reasons are almost always published literature references—called prior art in the trade—that the patent examiner missed in the search. 

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