Posts Tagged: "independent inventors"

Obtaining a patent can be the best business move you could ever make. On other hand, it may wind up costing you time, energy and a lot of money that you didn’t need to spend. The investment placed into getting a patent may be wise, but it is important to realize that no one is simply going to show up on your doorstep with a money dump truck and unload lottery like winnings onto your stoop. The road to riches in the invention world is hazardous, has many detours and seldom goes as planned. That is why the first question you absolutely must ask yourself before you rush off to your friendly neighborhood patent attorney is this: Why do you want to get a patent?

When you are moving from idea to invention to patent, regardless of how or why you find yourself stuck in the idea phase, the first order of business to get the ball rolling. You need momentum. In order to get that ball rolling what you need is a strategy to help you move past the idea and learn to describe your idea with enough specifics so that it no longer is what the law would call a merely an idea.  In a nutshell, if you can describe your idea with enough detail you don’t have an idea, what you have is an invention, or at least the makings of an invention. Here are 7 concrete steps you can take to help you get from your idea, to an invention worth patenting.

Many people ask: can ideas be patented? The short answer is no. Unfortunately, despite what you may have heard from late night television commercials, there is no effective way to protect an idea with any form of intellectual property protection. Copyrights protect expression and creativity, not innovation.  Patents protect inventions. Neither copyrights or patents protect ideas. This is not to suggest that ideas are not valuable, but they are not valuable in the same way or sense that pop culture has led many to believe.

In some important ways a patent application should be akin to an instruction manual, but unlike the aforementioned BBQ grill, the reader of relevant skill in the area is the one that should be able to follow along. Having said this, there is an important caveat! A patent is not a blueprint… Have you ever seen a worthwhile instruction manual without good, high-quality drawings showing you what to do? Probably not. So, if you’ve been frustrated by the decreasing quality of instruction manuals when “some assembly is required”, you fundamentally already know exactly what you need to do when you draft a patent application. Lots of drawings, lots of descriptive text that focuses on the key elements of the invention — that’s what makes a great patent application.

Writing a patent application is not as easy as many think. Indeed, the concept of usefully describing the invention, which on its face seems easy enough to understand, is not as straight forward as it might seem, and why you cannot simply file an abbreviate description of an invention and think that suffices to protect anything really. This article looks at the most common parts of a patent application, and provides discussion about what each section needs to include.

Having produced a non-obvious, non-abstract invention and playing by the patent office’s rules is no guarantee of a patent granting. Some examiners have refused to issue patent applications regardless of the merits because doing so would run the risk of them losing their jobs if they received further negative reviews from the Patent Quality initiative. All patents run the risk of expensive oppositions from well-funded competitors. 

Better practice remains to file applications with any and all drawings necessary to understand the invention. The best practice is not only to file what is necessary, but to also file drawings that go beyond what is minimally necessary. You never know later on during prosecution what details you may wish you had explained in the written text, what nuances you may wish you had elaborated upon. Drawings can be your best friend, and case law has shown that judges can and will look to the drawings to see what is fairly disclosed and would be understood by the person of skill in the relevant technology or scientific field. Therefore, with drawings more is better.

What follows is a letter on the topic of PTAB reform that will be sent to USPTO Director Andrei Iancu on Monday, May 14, 2018. The letter seeks urgent action on the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in order to bring balance to a process that has tormented inventors for the last 6 years. We already have over 100 signatures from patent owners, patent attorneys, investors and inventors. If you would like to sign onto this letter please visit http://100patentowners.org.

“We are focused on delivering reliable and predictable IP rights,” Director Iancu told the Inventor Group Presidents gathered at the Patent Office as he addressed them to start the day this morning. “I have called for a new dialog in intellectual property. A dialogue focused on the brilliance of the inventors, the excitement of invention and the incredible benefits they bring to our economy… to our history.”

Frequently one of the most challenging aspects of inventing is determining what need a particular invention fills. This is not to suggest that inventors do not know what their invention does, why they created the invention in the first place, or how it might be used by a potential consumer. Instead, one of the biggest issues I see is inventors not having a good grasp of why an invention might be desirable from the viewpoint of consumers who might be perfectly willing to use various substitutes.

Inventorship is one of the most fundamental concepts in patent law. Of course, fundamental does not mean easy or uncomplicated. Patents are granted to inventors, which is easy enough to say but not always as informative as the patent laws presume it to be. In fact, pretty much everyone comes to patent law for the first time with an erroneous…

So what is an admission? A statement made during patent prosecution identifying the work of another as prior art is called an admission. Admissions can and will be relied upon by patent examiners for both novelty (35 U.S.C. 102) and obviousness (35 U.S.C. 103) determinations, regardless of whether the admitted prior art would otherwise qualify as prior art under the express terms of the statute. Admissions should be avoided at all costs, regardless of how innocent they seem to be. This is a lesson that all new patent practitioners and inventors need to take to heart. No matter how innocuous the statement may seem, always remember that no good deed will go unpunished! Everything you do say can and will be used against your patent once it issues — forever.

Provisional applications can be a very useful tool, but only when they are done right. When provisional patent applications are done poorly you not only obtain no benefit, the filing potentially demonstrates you were not in possession of an invention, which could be catastrophically bad.

Patents are expensive to obtain. The last thing you want to do is spend a lot of money if there are easy to find references a US patent search could locate… If you hire a professional patent search firm you may want to also consider adding an international patent search. Some search firms may already include an international patent search in the price, or at least a search of certain foreign databases. While US patent searches are essential, international patent searches are preferable if you can afford the extra cost.

There really is no one-size-fits-all approach inventors can follow, and there is no inventing roadmap to success that will work in all cases. Notwithstanding, there are certainly a number of things that can and should be understood if an inventor is going to pursue inventing as more than a hobby. By understanding some basic but critical information at the outset…