ABSTRACT
Patents reside at the intersection of technology, law and commerce as governmental guarantees that companies and individuals who develop new products and processes may take legal action to prevent others from manufacturing, selling or using their inventions. Patents contain vast stores of practical scientific and engineering information, much of it unique. The grant of a patent by a national government gives the owners of the invention the right to exclude others from making, using or selling the thing invented and the right to sell or license those rights to others. Most of the abstracting and indexing services that index patents have made their databases available online. Patents and published patent applications are issued with a document number that is used in combination with the country name or Information Standards Organization country code to identify it. The technical content of patents is made more accessible to searchers through subject indexing applied by both the patent issuing authorities and some database producers.
