nanoREV.

Eye candy: the carbon nanotube patent landscape

In Vol. 3 Issue 4 of the Nanotechnology Law and Business Journal, John Miller and Drew Harris identify key patents while exploring the carbon nanotube patent landscape. The article is interesting, as the authors describe not only some of the CNT patents related to compositions of matter and processes, but also some of the actual products which utilitize these nanotubes.

As a former patent examiner, it’s always interesting for me to “see” what the patent landscape for a particular technology actually looks like. Sure, a quick keyword based search using the PTO’s early 1990s public web-interface kind of offers some of this, but a visual representation of how patents relate to one another adds a bit of historical context to it all.

Here’s a interactive graphic representation of the carbon nanotube landscape as it relates to forward and backward citations around one of Richard Smalley’s patents- US 6,790,425 :

While forward/backward searches are readily available with the internal USPTO tools provided to examiners, this interface could potentially provide junior examiners a head start on understanding how a given art (in this case carbon nanotube thin films) has progressed. Furthermore, since examiners are only given a limited amount of time to read, understand and interpret an application and the included references, while preparing a detailed office action, seeing how patents relate to one another may alleviate some of the burden that lengthy information disclosure statements may cause.

Thanks to Joe Hadzima at IPVision for the map! Check out http://www.see-the-forest.com/ for other sample maps.