Legal Question in Intellectual Property in Illinois

The issue here is that it could have a number of layers of protection, including copyright, design patents and utility patents. You need to check various classes and subclasses in the patent databases as well as search of copyrights. Without further knowledge of your frames, I cannot comment further.

Good luck!

To answer your question, you can find information at Google Patents, direct from the US Patent & Trademark Office, and the Copyright Office. Google those terms and you will find the links. What you are looking for is a "patent clearance"or "right-to-use patent search" and that is something that would be extremely foolish and imprudent to try to do yourself. A novice is simply not qualified to do that sort of patent search or copyright search. You can do a quick check on the free site Google Patents or FreePatentsOnline, with the aim in mind to see if you yourself can find a blocking patent. However, unless you know what patent claims are, where to find them in patents, and how to interpret the sophisticated language used in them in view of the current state of the law as interpreted by the courts, you will still not know whether a patent would be infringed and will probably just confuse yourself. You will need a patent attorney for that, preferably one experienced in these sorts of clearances and the requirements for a good patent clearance opinion. This is not an optional choice really, because if you do a sloppy do-it-yourself patent clearance search, the current case law makes it likely you will be held to be a willful infringer as any patent owner's attorney (patent enforcement litigator) will claim your search shows you knew ther3e was a risk and you did not take the risk seriously enough to do it right. If you do no search you will likely be held to be a willful infringer on the basis that you knew there was a risk and apparently did not care. Only if you have a well prepared patent clearance opinion will you be confident that you are not likely to be held to have deliberately infringed. These are very, very expensive opinions, usually $20,000 minimum, and since they often determine whether you are in business or out of business can run much, much more where the business justifies the expense.

Having said all that, there is something you can do to reduce the cost and to help guide yourself. That is to run a limited clearance search on a particular company of concern to you. Specifically, if you are copying a frame and know the company producing the frame, you can run a patent search to find all eyeglass frame patents owned by that company. Obviously if they have no patents the risk is less than if you find they own a hundred patents. If they own patents, you can look to see what sort of things they patent and make a cursory analysis as to whether they show or describe any of the features you are copying. If you can't tell, which is usually the case, you will need a patent attorney to look at the patents. In that case the cost is much less since the attorney is only looking at patents you have found and determining and opining on whether the patents you found have any relevant claims and if so whether your proposed products would infringe those claims.

I can do all of this, and am an Illinois patent lawyer. Call if you want to do this right and be safe, but recognize advice does not come cheap, except for this general advice just given.