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In 2011, Apple Inc.'s lawsuit against Samsung has determinative influence on the importance for the enterprises' exertion of design patent over product protection. With four design patents, including the appearance of iPhone and iPad related to GUI, Apple lodged a claim against Samsung for the royalty of 7 USD per mobile device. As to Taiwan, the part involving design patent was modified to a great extent on 2011, which enlarged the range of protection object and made design patent application even more flexible. In addition, from 2011 to 2013, the amount of application to utility and invention patents had declined gradually, and only that of design patent raised against the trend, apparently showing the significance of design patent, and predicting the considerable demand on design patent map in the future In this regard, the first step as well as the most important step for the patent map is patent searching. In this research, the design patent searching methods are Classification Searching and Keyword Searching. Regarding classification design, old classification and Locarno classification in use now have been employed. As to Keyword Searching, since Taiwan Patent Search System's interface mainly concentrates on including invention and utility patent data, this research then explored the content of each searching field, and proposed the searching fields for design patent to conduct Keyword Searching, including (1) Title, (2) Abstract, (3) Claim, and (4) Description. On the basis of the official literature of the Intellectual Property Office of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, introduction to the international industrial design classification, and Taiwan's patent related laws and regulations, a great amount of searching has been conducted by Taiwan's patent information searching system for the design patent. To observe the practical searching results, the searching rules for Taiwan's design patent in respect with Classification Searching and Keyword Searching have been synthesized and generalized, expecting to help the design related working personnel proceed design patent searching in Taiwan. |