Q: How do u find out if someone has a patent on a wooded kite?
A:
The only way to know is to search. Even if you search you may have some small risk that a patent application is ahead of you in the pipeline but is not visible yet. However, searching is the commercially reasonable way to reduce your risk of running into a problem.
One strategy is to limit what you do to things in expired patents. That won't work for high tech but for some products where a solution from 20 years ago may be commercially viable today, that is safety. No one should be able to obtain a patent that covers something that was patented or sold 20 years ago.
My slides on searching may help. http://bit.ly/Patent_Searching
Kevin E Flynn
John Espinosa agrees with this answer
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