Posts Tagged: "patent costs"

BRICS is an acronym for an association of five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Over the last 25 years, the BRICS economies have been at the forefront of a paradigm shift in the sands of the global economy towards developing economies. This is exemplified by their share in the global economy… Developing a patent filing strategy that includes BRICS economies could be challenging due to the presence of varying national legislation, each mandating its own set of procedures. A precise idea of the costs that could be incurred will go a long way in facilitating strategic decision-making and budget forecasting.

When a court stays a litigation and an IPR results in a settlement, adverse judgement invalidating all claims, or a final decision invalidating all claims, then the IPR reduces overall costs, which are the total litigation and IPR costs for both plaintiffs and defendants to resolve the dispute. But if the PTAB denies the IPR petition or allows one or more challenged claims, then the IPR fails to resolve the disputes between the parties, and any imposed stay may be lifted. In these instances, IPRs increase overall costs… A closer look reveals that IPRs have a nominal impact to reduce overall costs—just 6%.

I used to receive telephone calls, quite frequently, asking about the procedure for preparing and filing a patent application. Today, I no longer receive these calls. I suspect the main reason is that inventors are giving up an expectation that patent protection is even worthwhile. And I get it. If I were to get a call these days, I could no longer paint a rosy picture for would-be patentees… But these days, I fear the conversation would have a different tone. It might go more like this… “for a mere $2,625,000 you can disclose your most important innovation to your competitors, and they can use it and make sure that you actually have no rights to it.”

In several jurisdictions across the globe, the costs are a function of various variables such as the mode of filing, the type of applicant, the number of pages of the specification and claims, and the number of claims/independent claims/multiple dependent claims. The costs generally have three components (official, associate/attorney, and translation) that are spread across the different stages of the patenting process (filing, examination and prosecution, grant, and maintenance or renewal or annuity). For instance, let us consider a PCT application filed by a large entity comprising 50 pages (including 5 pages of drawings and 10 pages of claims) and 20 claims (including 3 independent claims) which is to be electronically filed in the top 10 jurisdictions, namely Canada (CA), China (CN), European Patent Office (EP), Israel (IL), India (IN), Iran (IR), Japan (JP), South Korea (KR), Russia (RU), and the United States (US)

When setting out on a new endeavor it is not wise to pursue a path to the end and then ask whether what you did was correct. You should seek help along the way to make sure you are doing what is required. Otherwise you are likely to get to a point where the most economical solution is simply to start over.

Estimating US patent costs is a difficult matter because so much depends on the technology involved, but answering “it depends” is not particularly insightful or helpful. What follows are some general ballpark estimates, which should give at least some guidance when trying to budget for the filing of a patent application at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

How much you will spend on a patent application also depends upon what it is that you want to do with the patent and whether there are realistic market opportunities. In the event there are realistic market opportunities you may spend more even on something that is simple to make sure that you have covered the invention enough to have a strong resulting patent. By way of example, you could probably find an attorney to write a patent for a business method or computer software for quite cheap, but a cheap computer related patent would not be nearly as strong as a patent application costing $20,000 or more. The devil is always in the details. Getting a stronger patent requires more claims and more attention to providing an adequate disclosure and describing as many alternatives, options, variations and different embodiements as possible. This, of course, requires greater attorney time and higher filing fees, which in turn requires more time spent working with the patent examiner to get the patent issued.