Posts in Patent Drafting Basics
Distinguishing Colloquial Obviousness and Legal Obviousness
Have you ever worked with a lay inventor who had a hard time dealing with obviousness under U.S. patent law? Many patent lawyers have. It is …
AI Patents Make a Comeback at USPTO, Finance Patents Are Still Struggling
Artificial Intelligence (AI) patents have made a strong comeback under the new 2019 Revised Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance. As the first graph above shows, allowances per office …
Japan Patent Office Case Examples on Artificial Intelligence Offer Guidance for Other Offices on Treating AI Inventions
The Japan Patent Office recently added ten new case examples pertinent to artificial intelligence-related technology to Annex A of its Japanese Patent Examination Handbook. The examples are …
Anatomy of a Valuable Patent: Building on the Structural Uniqueness of an Invention
From a conceptual standpoint, it would seem logical to assume that writing text to describe a particular invention ought to be easy for the inventor of that …
Winning Strategies for Getting Past the Five Types of Patent Examiner
Any patent attorney knows that each patent examiner can vary greatly in approach to examination. In this article, five different types of patent examiners and suggest prosecution …
Software Patent Drafting Lessons from the Key Lighthouse Cases
Obtaining a U.S. software patent is still harder than it was five years ago, but studying these "lighthouse" cases can improve one's chances of success. While …
Patent Drafting Basics: Instruction Manual Detail is What You Seek
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 …
How to Write a 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 …
Admissions as Prior Art in a Patent: What they are and why you need to avoid them
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 …
Patent Drafting: The most valuable patent focuses on structural uniqueness of an invention
It can be enormously difficult for inventors to describe their own inventions. This is true not because the inventor doesn’t know what they’ve invented, or …
Patent Drafting: Proving You’re in Possession of the Invention
The purpose of the written description requirement is broader than to merely explain how to make and use the invention, which is the subject of the enablement …
Patent Drafting: Understanding the Enablement Requirement
The enablement requirement is specifically aimed at ensuring the claimed invention is described with sufficient detail so the relevant person of skill in the art or technology …
Patent Drafting 101: Say What You Mean in a Patent Application
When drafting a patent application it is always the best policy to never assume anything. It is dangerous to assume that the reader will fill in any …
Patent Drafting 101: Going a Mile Wide and Deep with Variations in a Patent Application
You absolutely want to file a patent application with a description that is a mile wide — that part is good — but you also need to also drill …
Learning from common patent application mistakes by inventors
The goal in a patent application is to provide a full, clear, and exact description of the invention in a way that particularly points out and distinctly …
