U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Search System

The basic role of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was laid out in Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries." More than 200 years later, the role remains largely the same, and the PTO has found an ideal medium in the Web for disseminating patent and trademark information and facilitating the development and sharing of new technologies worldwide. You'll find plenty of useful information about the PTO and the patent and trademark process, plus searchable databases of patents and trademarks complete with images. Whether you're an entrepreneur with a new product or business idea, a manager with responsibility for R&D or a businessperson interested in timely topics like the controversial patenting of business methods or the intersection of trademarks and domain names, the PTO Web site is a rich source of information on the processes of innovation and intellectual property.