Posts Tagged: "provisional patent application"

This is an age old question that is really the patent/invention equivalent of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Moving forward with a patent doesn’t make a lot of sense if the invention is not likely to be marketable. I always tell folks that the best invention to patent is one you will make money with regardless of having a patent, so I do believe there needs to be market considerations factored into the analysis. After all, the goal is to make money. Investing in a business, or investing to obtain a patent only makes sense if there is a reason to believe more money will be made than spent. Having said that, without a patent pending you have absolutely no protection, at least unless you obtain a signed confidentiality agreement and even then the protection will be applicable only to those who have signed the agreement.

Just because getting a confidentiality agreement is difficult doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. There are those out there that are used to signing confidentiality agreements, such as manufacturers and engineers who you might need to work with to create engineering drawings or a prototype. Whenever you are showing your invention to someone within your industry or to those who would have the technical knowledge and ability to move forward with your invention without you, a confidentiality agreement is both essential and more likely to be obtained. Just don’t expect investors or potential licensees to be all that interested in signing a confidentiality agreement , at least at first. However, if they like what they hear it is not unheard of that at some point they might be willing to sign a confidentiality agreement. So there is many times a delicate dance where you show a little to entice the reluctant signer of the confidentiality agreement. As interest builds they may become more willing to sign.

But there are no doubt some bizarre patent applications that have published over the years, such as a method of walking through walls like a ghost. See Knowing When You Have Too Much Time on Your Hands. So you never know quite what you will get with a patent application, although the jokesters are typically kept at a minimum given the expense of filing a patent application… The real problem is that the failure to include claims or realistic breadth means that there will be no meaningful examination provided by the examiner in the first of two substantives reviews. If such obviously overbroad claims are the ones that are in the file at the time of first examination it will be virtually impossible to obtain a patent without at least one, perhaps multiple, additional filings and amendments, all of which cost time and money for the inventor/applicant. The old saying “garbage in, garbage out” comes to mind.

A patent is a proprietary right granted by the United States federal government to an inventor who files a patent application with the United States Patent Office. Therefore, unlike copyright and trademark protection, patent protection will only exist upon the issuance of a patent, which requires you to file a patent application. You absolutely must file a patent application and have that application mature into an issued patent in order to obtain exclusive rights to your invention.

I understand it is prudent to proceed with care and not needlessly waste money, which is why I try and help inventors understand how best to start the patent process on a budget, but a couple hundred dollars is not really a budget. You might as well go to Vegas and put it all down on black and let it ride. At least you have close to a 50% chance, which is a greater chance of success than having only a few hundred to spend on your invention. Inventors really need to know and fully understand that there is a big difference between inventing and describing an invention. For well over 100 years courts have marveled at how difficult it is to draft a patent application.

On Wednesday, December 5, 2012, the House of Representatives passed two bills that are now await President Obama’s signature. The bill — S. 3486— implements both the Patent Law Treaty (PLT) and the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs. The U.S. Senate previously passed the same bill in the same form on September 22, 2012. Thus, the remaking of U.S. patent law and patent practice continues, and we will see more rulemaking coming from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Even when hiring a patent attorney inventors still need to be engaged in order to give the patent attorney the best information available about the invention. This seems simple enough, but so many inventors fail to understand what information is important and why it is necessary.  If you don’t understand that “why” you will you will almost never be able to provide all the information necessary.

It takes time to prepare a detailed written disclosure that will support any number of claims, and there is just no way to rush it. Inventors and entrepreneurs intuitively know this, but still some get lured into believing that what they get for $1,200 is just as good as what they would get if they paid $8,000, which is unrealistic of course. You should not fall for what you want to hear when you deep down know it makes no sense. If you aren’t convinced ask yourself this: When you were in school and you had to write a paper for a grade, was the resulting paper better if you spent more time or less time working on the project? The reality is the more time you have to spend the better the work product. If you are not paying very much then you realistically cannot expect the same number of hours, nor can you expect the same level of quality.

There really is no one-size-fits-all approach to inventing that can be claimed to be a road-map to success that will work in all cases. Notwithstanding, there are certainly a number of things that can and should be done early in the inventing process if an inventor is going to pursue inventing as more than a hobby. I continually preach to inventors the need to follow what I call a “business responsible” approach, which is really just my way of counseling inventors to remember that the goal is to not only invent but to hopefully make some money. Truthfully, the goal is to make more money than what has been invested, which is how the United States Congress defined “success” in the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999.  The odds of being successful with one of your inventions increase dramatically if you engage in some simple steps to ensure you are not investing time and money on an invention that has little promise.