Intellectual Property Resources
The original Patent Office Building (now converted to the National Portrait Gallery) is the third oldest federal office building (after the White House and the Capitol Building) in Washington, D. C. Clearly, the Founding Fathers recognized the importance of IP not only in the Constitution but in marble and mortar as well.
A number of patent resources are listed below. The link to the Patent Office website provides databases where searches can be run and images obtained. There are other resources that (often after registering) provide free copies of patents from a searchable database. Google Patents has teamed up with the USPTO to provide a number of their patent products for free. A number of useful patent services are catalogued by the European Patent Office and by Bandacorp Patent Services. A little search and experimentation should turn up any needed tools in at least one of these sites. One item that is very useful is a patent database in text-searchable PDF (e.g., Free Patent PDFs). In this day and age where recent Supreme Court findings on obviousness have changed the rules on how examiners at the PTO can raise objections in new and creative ways, it is often crucial to be able to search patents for specific terms. The creativity in combining precedents has been seen to extend to terms that exist nowhere other than the objection. Without a good searchable text mechanism, the defense of a patent application could turn out to be a race between going blind and going insane.
United States Patent and Trademark Office