Patent: A property right granted by the Government of the United States of America to an inventor “to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into the United States” for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure of the invention when the patent is granted.
There are three different types of patents:
There are two types of utility patent applications, provisional and non-provisional.
One advantage of provisional applications is that they are less expensive than their regular counterparts. However, there are some important things to consider when filing a provisional application. Provisional applications are good only for 12 months. This means that you must file a corresponding non-provisional application during this time period to take full advantage of the extended 12 month time period or face the expiration of your provisional application.
What is Patentable?
Utility patents are provided for a new, non obvious and useful:
Note: In addition to utility patents, encompassing one of the categories above, patent protection is available for (1) ornamental design of an article of manufacture or (2) asexually reproduced plant varieties by design and plant patents.
What cannot be patented:
Inventions which are:
Information Provided by the University of Texas Libraries
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
The USPTO offers web access to bibliographic and full-text patent databases. These databases provide full-text of patents from 1976 to the present and full page images from 1790 to the present.
Provides access to the latest published US patent applications each week BEFORE the USPTO decision to grant/deny.
pat2pdf.org
Given a patent number, pat2pdf.org will return a free, pdf of the patent.
Espacenet
The European Patent Office
Cooperative Patent Classification Hierarchy and Description
European Patent Office
The Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO—from patents issued in the 1790s to present.