Before paying for a prototype or a patent attorney, it is worth an hour to find out whether someone has already patented the idea. Typing the idea into a normal search engine mostly finds shops selling things that look like it, which says nothing about patents. A patent search looks in the documents that patent offices publish, and Google Patents covers most of the world's offices for free. The steps below run that search from the Paper screen of the osFoundry desktop app, so every patent you find is saved next to the line of the idea it relates to. The example idea is a water bottle that glows when you forget to drink.
Write the idea down first
Open Paper, choose Local, and click "New paper". Write the idea the way you would explain it to a friend: what it is, what it does, who it is for.
Then switch to Research, drag over the phrase that is the actual invention ("a water bottle that glows when you forget to drink"), and click Create. That makes a thinking space tied to the phrase. Anything you save in it later stays linked to those words, which helps once the idea has more than one part and each part needs its own search.
Search in plain English
In the thinking space, click + and choose "Patent search". Type the idea in a few plain words and click Search:
water bottle glows reminder to drink
The search goes straight to Google Patents, needs no account or API key, and covers every patent office Google indexes. This query came back with 2,757 documents. English works best even for patents filed elsewhere, because Google adds an English translation to most of them: the third result here, "Liquid intake management system" (JP6067764B2), is a Japanese patent.
Keep only granted patents
Set the status filter from "Granted + applications" to Granted. The list drops to 685.
The difference matters. A granted patent is one a patent office examined and approved, and its owner can stop others from using what its claims describe. An application is a request still waiting, or one that was refused or abandoned. Applications are still worth reading, because anything published before your own filing date counts as prior art, granted or not. But for "can I sell this without trouble", the granted list is where to look first.
Two things about the count. It counts documents, not inventions: the second result below also appears as its published application, US20220218137A1, under the same title. And relevance falls off fast. Even in the granted list, the fourth result is a steam generator for electronic cigarettes. Read the first 20 or so carefully, and if they are off, change the words (light, LED and hydration instead of glows and drink) rather than scrolling.
Read the closest hit
The second result is the one that matters here: "Smart container with interactive, colored lights", US12082729B2, from Hidratesmart LLC. Its priority date is 30 April 2019 and it was published as a granted patent on 10 September 2024. The abstract describes a bottle with a load cell, an accelerometer, a processor and a colored light source.
Three fields tell you most of what you need:
- The number: the letters are the country (US, JP, EP, CN) and the suffix is the kind: B1 or B2 is a granted US patent, A1 a published US application.
- The priority date: the date the invention was first filed anywhere. Whoever filed first wins, so this is the date that counts, not the publication date.
- The claims: the title and abstract only describe the patent. What it actually protects is the list of claims. Click Open to read them on Google Patents.
A close title is not the end of an idea. The claims may cover a weight sensor and an app, while your version only needs a timer. Whether a difference is enough is a question for a patent attorney, but you will go into that meeting with a list.
Save it next to the idea
Click "Save source" on the result. It goes into the paper's References with its number and a link to Google Patents, under the phrase it belongs to.
One note on speed: Google Patents pauses a network that sends many searches in a short time. The app says so above the results, and if you add your own SerpAPI key, it keeps searching through SerpAPI instead.
Doing it without the app
The same search works at patents.google.com: type the words, then use the Status filter on the left. For Japanese patents, J-PlatPat (the Japan Patent Office's free database) searches the Japanese text directly, and Espacenet covers European filings. Whichever you use, save the numbers and priority dates as you go, because the second search always finds something the first one missed.
The Paper screen is described on the page for osFoundry's Paper workspace, and the app is free from the osFoundry download page for macOS, Windows and Linux.
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