Patent Collection at Purdue

United States patents on DVD are available from 1790-date and patent applications are available from March 2001-date. There is no cost for using this service. The Engineering Library also has full color plant patents available on paper and microfiche for use in the library.

U.S. patents can also be searched on the web from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).  Issued Patents are loaded each Tuesday while Published Applications are loaded each Thursday.  Publications on DVD arrive at the Engineering Library a few weeks after the patent documents are loaded.  Presently, the site requires a TIFF viewer that is available on the site.  Pages are printed one at a time.

See this page for more information about US Patents and Trademarks

60 million patent documents from 85 countries are available from the web via esp@cenet made available by the European Patent Office. A whole patent document may be printed by viewing the original document or “also published as” documents.  One uses the “Save Whole Document” function to print or save the whole document.  A list of countries is available from this link. Links to some national patent offices, including the US, Canada, and Japan, are available on the Patent Resources page. To find more information about international patents, see the Patents and Trademarks - Global page.

If you need answers to legal questions, you wish to file a patent or trademark or complete a comprehensive patent search, etc, you should seek the assistance of a legal professional who specializes in intellectual property. Help finding a legal professional is available from the Patent Links page.

Assistance using the patent and trademark searching tools and collection is available during regular reference hours. We can assist you as you perform your patent and trademark searches, however, reference staff can neither perform patent and trademark searches for you, answer questions of a legal nature nor provide legal advice or give opinions such as determining the patentability of an invention, viability of a trademark, or search keywords, classifications or fields. Staff cannot help select appropriate forms or assist in writing an application.

Other resources about patents, trademarks, copyrights, and links for inventors are available from the USPTO, national patent offices, attorneys, corporations and other many other sources and can be found on the Patent Links page.