Prior-art search: what it is and how to do it
Before investing in a patent, the decisive question is: "does something similar already exist?". Answering it is the job of the prior-art search: it's the step that, more than any other, determines whether it's worth moving forward.
⚠️ Informational guide, not legal advice. A full search should be entrusted to a patent attorney.
What is the "state of the art"
The state of the art is everything made available to the public before your filing date, in any form and anywhere in the world: patents, applications, articles, products on the market, presentations, websites. If your invention is already described there, novelty is missing (Art. 54 EPC) and it is not patentable.
Why it's essential
- You avoid spending thousands of euros on something that already exists.
- You understand the real margin: very close prior art puts inventive step at risk (Art. 56 EPC).
- You strengthen the application: you know what to claim as truly distinctive.
How to do a preliminary search
- Extract the technical keywords of the invention and translate them into English: databases are indexed in English.
- Search with free tools: Espacenet (EPO, over 140 million documents) and Google Patents.
- Use the classification (IPC/CPC): finding the right technical class makes the search far more precise than keywords alone.
- Follow citations: from the most relevant patents, look at cited and citing documents.
- Assess: do you find something identical (novelty at risk) or very similar (inventive step at risk)?
The limits of "DIY"
A manual search is free but hard: technical-legal language, thousands of results, complex classification, English. It's easy to miss a prior art that does exist (false confidence) or get lost among irrelevant results.
How Kanryx speeds up pre-screening
Kanryx translates and classifies your invention, searches the European database (EPO) for relevant documents and returns similar patents with a relevance estimate and a reasoned patentability score, in minutes. It's a preliminary, non-exhaustive analysis meant to orient you before a professional search, without replacing it.
Frequently asked questions
Is a prior-art search mandatory? No, but skipping it is the fastest way to waste money on something already known.
Is it enough to search products on sale? No: an invention may not be on the market but already described in an old patent.