Does a favorable preliminary patentability search guarantee a patent?
Not at all. While the USPTO is an excellent source for determining what technical information is in the public domain, prior art is not limited to patent documents. Prior art may also include publications (articles, papers, etc.), sales of an invention, or even uses of the invention in public, none of which are covered in a typical preliminary patentability search. Moreover, patent applications currently are maintained in secrecy by the USPTO until they are published, which occurs sometime after the application has been pending for eighteen months. For these and other reasons, a preliminary patentability search is not a perfect representation of all of the art that may be applicable to a given invention. Even so, the publicly available repository of patents and published applications at the USPTO is one of the best single sources of prior art documents available. Moreover, this is the primary source of prior art the Examiner will use when he or she performs a search of a patent applica
