If you have filed a patent application in U.S., this article will help you check the status of your U.S. patent application.
Before reading this article, you may also think that you can search Google patents for this purpose. Well, you are correct, however, one downside with Google patents is that it takes some time to be updated and may not reflect the most recent patent data or legal events.
For the latest information, I recommend going to USPTO Public PAIR (short for Patent Application Information Retrieval). You can use USTPO public PAIR to retrieve all documents and related information by doing a patent search by number (application number, patent number, or publication number). To start with, go to the above-mentioned link and you will see the below screen:
Select any type of the provided numbers that are known to you and search for it. For example, in the above image, the application number is entered. Remember to comply with the suggested format in parenthesis.
You will now see the below screen with details of your patent application:
The displayed data includes all bibliographic details of your patent application under the tab ‘Application data‘.
If you want to see the documents, go to the tab labelled ‘Image file wrapper‘ and you will see a list of documents like below. You can either view these documents in the browser or download them by checking the boxes on the extreme right column and clicking the ‘PDF’ option on the top of the right-most column.
The documents should give you a detailed assessment of the status of the case. However, if you want to briefly check the legal events or the status of this case, you can check the tab titled ‘Transaction history‘ and it will list the legal events by dates as shown below:
The remaining tabs are self-explanatory but following is a brief about what they cover:
Continuity Data – This tab covers the family patent applications that are continuations or continuations-in-part of the patent you are searching.
Foreign Priority – This tab covers the details of foreign patent applications (filed outside U.S.) from which your patent application takes priority.
Published documents – This tab provides the publication number of your patent publication (publication number is different from the application number).
Address & Attorney/Agent – This tab provides details of the Patent Attorney or Agent that you may have appointed to handle the patent application.
Assignments – This is one of the most important areas you should keep a check on, since this provides the assignment detail. Assignee is someone who owns the rights to the patent application. All the assignments that are recorded with USPTO are displayed here for reference.
I hope this article was useful in understanding how to track your U.S. patent application. Please subscribe to this blog for more such articles on patent fundamentals.
Please follow and like us:
