It tells you a little of their history and where you might currently find them. Prior art is the patent system's term for published information about the technique or technology on which the invention that is being examined for patentability is based. Often, this information is included in a patent application, because inventors are required to provide any prior art that they know about. The patent examiner has a limited amount of time to search this and other sources of prior information to see whether anything can and should be patented. Prior art searches, first conducted by the inventor or the inventor's law firm and then repeated under time constraints by patent examiners, are time-consuming and difficult on traditional cases.
Traditional cases have previous patents and proven resources, such as journals, to search.
However, new types of cases do not have proven resources or old patents to search through. The new business method, software, and biotechnology patents are the core of the problem. Business method patents connect ways of conducting a business with a particular technology, such as a way to handle a transaction using specific computer software. There are no old patents in this field. There are no peer-reviewed journals of business processes or software innovations.