A friend passed on this link to me. It’s for an organization that exists to give credentials to patent searchers.
Searching the corpus of prior publications, and assessing the results, can be an important part of assessing the patentability of one’s invention, of deciding on a strategy for patenting or for business development in general, and of developing a research program to support one’s patent applications. Once submitted, patent applications generally can’t be modified by incorporation of new information, so applicants who don’t do a search before drafting patent applications do so at their own risk: if the application is written in a way that it appears that the claimed invention is known or is obvious in view or prior publications, and there’s insufficient material to support changes to the claims that would overcome those problems, the application won’t be allowed.
Searching, however, can be a haphazard affair. The quality of a search is dependent on many factors, including the applicant’s budget, the field of endeavor, the applicant’s budget, the experience of the searcher, the applicant’s budget, the number of languages spoken by the searcher, and the applicant’s budget. Today there are many options for patent searching: many patent law firms offer such services; a number of national patent offices (e.g. Sweden, Norway, Switzerland) offer such services, since a good part of an examiner’s time is spent doing searches; and many private organizations which are not law firms, many of which are based in India, offer such services. Additionally, many national patent offices are now underworked, so another approach to searching is to draft and file a first application, and to obtain an early search and/or examination report well before the priority year has ended, then file one or more further applications before the end of the priority year that include material meant to address issues raised in the search. Israel offers such a service, which includes an examination report; this can be done at the UK IPO as well, more easily and for less money, and with the advantage that one can request only a search report, without an examination report.
The idea of professional licensing or certification is, of course, not new, and it is not foreign to patent practitioners, who in most jurisdictions are licensed. But the idea of giving certification to patent searching is a new one. This could be a genuine attempt to provide some meaningful certification for patent searchers, but it could also be a ruse to sell a “certification” that enriches the certifying organization without really providing benefit to the public that uses the search services. I didn’t find anything on the organization’s site explaining under what laws it has been incorporated, which makes me wonder about its legitimacy. I can think of at least one patent firm that will likely obtain this certification, simply to use it as a differentiator from other firms.
In any event, today is the last day to take advantage of some lowered criteria for certification.