IP Street takes know-how and confidence when helping you manage your IP assets. We help you better understand the duration of a patent, the value of a patent and patent analytics.

Conducting a thorough patent search is difficult, particularly for the novice. Patent searching is a learned skill. A novice in the United States could contact the nearest Patent and Trademark Depository Library (PTDL) and seek out search experts to help in setting up a search strategy.

A plant patent covers asexually reproducible plants (that is, through the use of grafts and cuttings), such as flowers. Sexually reproducible plants (that is, those that use pollination), can be monopolized under the Plant Protection Act. Both sexually and asexually reproducible plants can now also be monopolized by utility patent. Plant patents are comparatively recent innovations, the first one being granted in 1930. A plant patent is granted by the Government to an inventor (or the inventor's heirs or assigns) who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced a distinct and new variety of plant, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state. The grant, which lasts for 20 years from the date of filing the application, protects the inventor's right to exclude others from asexually reproducing, selling, or using the plant so reproduced. This protection is limited to a plant in its ordinary meaning: (1) A living plant organism which expresses a set of characteristics determined by its single, genetic makeup or genotype, which can be duplicated through asexual reproduction, but which can not otherwise be "made" or "manufactured." (2) Sports, mutants, hybrids, and transformed plants are comprehended; sports or mutants may be spontaneous or induced. Hybrids may be natural, from a planned breeding program, or somatic in source. While natural plant mutants might have naturally occurred, they must have been discovered in a cultivated area. (3) Algae and macro fungi are regarded as plants, but bacteria are not. A utility patent would be filed for claims to plants, seeds, genes, etc. According to the USPTO, there were 959 plant patent applications filed in 2009.

"The increased importance of intellectual property assets like patents and patent portfolios, along with the added complexity of valuing and analyzing risk for these information goods, has created a marketplace populated by players ill-equipped to handle the high transaction costs and information asymmetries representative of inteHectual property transactions. Accordingly, entities that can lower net transaction costs and improve information access will be able to take advantage of the unique nature of these assets." (Allen Wang, 2010, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, "Rise of the Patent Intermediaries") the tools atIPstreet.com could be a game changer.

Let IPstreet.com help you keep your patent portfolio organized. Organize your patents into groups, related to your product offerings. Identify each patent into a few tiers, where top-tiered patents are of higher commercial importance. This internal ranking can help identify which patents to maintain both domestically and internationally. Additionally, such a simple ranking will allow for establishing strategic enforcement guidelines. Resources are limited, so knowledge to identify which patents are most important can result in better utilization of resources. Using our patent search tools, you can better understand the value of a patent and analytics behind it.