There are 3 main types of patents:
WPI's Intellectual Property & Innovation Office has an Intellectual Property Inventory Catalog, which lists the patent applications and granted patents from WPI researchers.
Nexis Uni provides access to more than 17,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis. Nexis Uni includes: 1) full-text access to thousands of news sources (primarily newspapers, magazines and journals) in the U.S. and abroad back to the 1970s; 2) aggregated economic data - including company financial information, and SEC filings and reports - on businesses, corporations, and industries in the U.S. and abroad; 3) full-text legal documents, including U.S. Federal and State court cases, federal and state agency regulations, Shepard's Citations to Supreme Court cases (back to 1789), and law reviews from the late 18th century to present.
Some patent sites require a tiff image viewer, such as the free AlternaTIFF plug-in. Another option is to convert patents to PDF using pat2pdf.org.
Search International patent search with full images in PDF format.
Provides free patent searching of U.S. and European registrations. Benefits include patents in PDF format as well as hyperlinked classification searching.
Search and display U.S. patents 1790 to the present using the technology that powers Google Book Search, with the ability to scroll and zoom in on text and illustrations.
A worldwide, open-access, free patent informatics resource. Search and retrieve the full-text of millions of patent documents from US, Europe, Australia and WIPO, their status and counterparts up to 70 countries. Free PDF downloads for US, Australian, PCT and European patent documents.
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) PATENTSCOPE Search Service enables users search fulltext of over 1.6 million published international patent applications.