Patent prior-art & novelty, in plain language

Short guides to how prior-art search works and how to make sense of a novelty report.

• What is a prior-art search?

  A prior-art search finds the existing public knowledge - patents and publications - closest to an invention, to judge how novel it really is. Here is what it is, why it matters, and how to run one.

• Novelty vs freedom-to-operate (FTO)

  Novelty asks whether your idea is new enough to patent; freedom-to-operate asks whether selling your product would infringe someone else's patent. They are different questions with different searches.

• How to read a prior-art matrix

  A prior-art matrix maps each feature of your invention against each close patent, so you can see at a glance which features are already disclosed and where the white space is.