WikiPatents is a public community that reviews worldwide patents and pending patent applications. The public can comments and rate patents and patent applications, search through millions of patents online for free, and access valuable patent research tools.

WikiPatents provides the public with greater access to and understanding of patents. WikiPatents goal is to become the crossroads at which inventors, engineers, scientists, patent owners, competitors, litigants, the open source community, IP attorneys, patent Examiners, and other concerned members of the patent community openly share relevant and valuable information about specific patents and patent applications and perform patent research.

Patent Examiners do an excellent job reviewing patents in the limited amount of time they are allotted to review patents. However, no single individual can accumulate all of the most relevant information to review a patent within 10 hours, 100 hours, or even 1,000 hours. The combined experience of the public through the WikiPatents Community can provide the information that Examiners, patent owners, investors, litigants, and others need in order to weigh the merits of patents and patent applications. Information added by WikiPatents Community Members provides transparency to the patent system. WikiPatents also provides free and very powerful research and analysis tools for patent professionals.

WikiPatents enables the open source community to communicate indirectly, informally, and anonymously with the USPTO and other worldwide patent offices by publicly posting relevant prior art and other resources for patent Examiner review. “For years now, we have been hearing concerns from the software community about the patent system, ” Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property Jon Dudas has commented. “It is important that those in the open source community are joining [the] USPTO to provide resources that are key to examining software-related applications.” (See http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/06-02.htm.) Relevant information posted on WikiPatents by interested and qualified members of the OSC will help the public and the USPTO assess the true novelty and value of pending and issued patents.

While we attempt to remove abusive comments that are inconsistent with the purpose of WikiPatents, as explained in our terms, we make no guarantee as to the accuracy, usefulness, comprehensiveness, “up-to-date-ness”, or relevance of any of its users additions to the database. You use the information on this site at your own risk.

In general, to qualify as prior art, the date of a reference should predate that of a patented invention. But, if in doubt, post the reference. The patent Examiners, Courts, and other interested parties will figure out the details during their formal review of the references you submit.

Users are key to the monitoring process. WikiPatents Members comment on the helpfulness of other comments to help the public sift through the best content. Members should also contact us to report any instance of another user who publishes false, disparaging, vicious, misleading, derogatory, obscene, degenerative, or malicious comments, who use crude or obscene language, who clearly spam the database with votes and comments without proper knowledge or research, or who simply rant and rave about political or personal agendas that are not directly relevant to the merits of a patent under review. The WikiPatents Community was developed to support and enhance the patent system by allowing the public to add accurate, objective, nonjudgmental, relevant information about patents and patent applications. WikiPatents reserves the right to take action against those who abuse their Member rights.

The WikiPatents database currently contains HTML text, TXT text, RTF text, and PDF images of patents and applications from the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Canada. We are committed to continually updating WikiPatents regularly and provide weekly updates to our database as new patents and patent applications are issued and pulished. If you notice a patent missing from our database, please contact us and let us know the patent number that is missing.

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