DESIGN PATENT PROSECUTION SEARCH
Important Update Note:
Decisions from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) are now available in the Prosearch database. These include both decisions published on the PTAB website and some that are not published. These PTAB decisions are distinguishable from the USPTO applications because they begin with a year (e.g. 2020) instead of a 29 or 35. This Beta version of the database is not yet able to apply a publication date other than a Tuesday to any document (as it was built for applications only), although we will fix this feature in later releases. For now, all PTAB decisions have the dates 01/01/2030 (for unpublished PTAB decisions) and 01/08/2030 (for published PTAB decisions). To search for just PTAB decisions, please use these dates in the Issue Date drop down menu. Please note that a selection of “Most Recent” in the Issue Date drop down menu currently will include all PTAB decisions as well as all design patent applications from the most recent issue date. To select only design patent applications from the most recent issue date, select “Custom Range” and put in the exact date.
About Prosecution Search
Use Prosecution Search to search through selected documents in design patent prosecution histories.
Prosecution history documents are updated weekly. Currently, there are selected documents from 37,000 prosecution histories of design patents issuing during the following time periods:
2021
All of 2021
2022
All of 2022
2023
All of 2023
2024
All of 2024 through April 2.
New prosecution histories will be added weekly throughout 2024.
NOTES:
Selected prosecution files typically contain at least a non-final rejection and enough related documents to determine whether the prosecution history is relevant to the matter you are researching. Selected documents from the prosecution history are merged into one pdf document. If the prosecution history is considered relevant to your research, you may download the pdf document. If additional documents from the prosecution history are needed, then the complete prosecution history file is available at the United States Patent and Trademark Office patent center website.
Searches
Searches may be conducted using single words or multiple words using search operators as follows:
Boolean Operators
AND + Example: patent AND functional will return documents containing both patent and functional
OR [no character] Example: patent OR functional will return documents containing either patent or functional
NOT !, – Example: patent NOT functional will return documents containing patent but not functional
Proximity Search
Proximity searches are used to find terms that are near each other in a document. Insert a tilde “~” symbol at the end of words in quotation marks followed by the number of words that create the proximity boundary. For example, “patent functional”~10 will find the terms “patent” and “functional” within 10 words of each other in the document. You may also use parenthesis within the quotation marks. For example “(broken lines) (new matter)”~20 will find the terms “broken lines” and “new matter” within 20 words of each other.
Fuzzy Search
A fuzzy search finds matches in terms that have a similar construction, expanding a term up to the maximum of 50 terms that meet the distance criteria of two or less.
To do a fuzzy search, use the tilde “~” symbol at the end of a single word with an optional parameter, a number between 0 and 2 (default), that specifies the edit distance. For example, “blue~” or “blue~1” would return “blue”, “blues”, and “glue”.
Fuzzy search can only be applied to terms, not phrases, but you can append the tilde to each term individually in a multi-part name or phrase. For example, “Unviersty~ of~ “Wshington~” would match on “University of Washington”.
Wildcard search
You can use generally recognized syntax for multiple (*) or single (?) character wildcard searches for prefix, infix, and suffix matching.
Grouping
You can use parentheses to create subqueries, including operators within the parenthetical statement. For example, motel+(wifi|luxury) will search for documents containing the “motel” term and either “wifi” or “luxury” (or both).