LETTER OF THE WEEK
Patents patience
really enjoyed reading Professor Newman’s piece on ‘Patent hunting’. I have been working in the patent profession for over 25 years and am qualified as a European Patent Attorney. As such, I have first-hand insight of the vast amount of information that is held in the global patent library, which is often overlooked by many engineers and academics. Access to the documents is free and getting much easier with tools such as Google Patent and Esp@cenet. And the professor is right that the level of information provided must be at a certain level of detail for a patent application to be accepted.
