Posts Tagged: "patent drawings"

Patent Drawings: An Economical Way to Expand Disclosure

U.S. patent law requires a patent applicant to furnish at least one patent drawing (sometimes referred to as a patent illustration) of the invention whenever the invention is capable of illustration by way of a drawing. Said another way, whenever a drawing would assist in the understanding of an invention patent drawings, or at least one patent drawing, is necessary.…

Patent Drawings and Invention Illustrations, What do you Need?

If you are going to file a patent application you must have drawings to include in the application, but patent drawings are not the only type of “drawings” that an inventor should be considering. Patent drawings are wonderful for a patent application, but they don’t always do the invention justice if you are trying to capture the attention of a prospective licensee, or if you are trying to convince a buyer to place orders or sell the invention in their store. Patent drawings and other types of invention drawings, such as 3D renderings and photo realistic virtual prototypes serve different purposes.

Patent Drawings 101: The Way to Better Patent Applications

To properly accomplish the goal of having the best disclosure possible you should also not think in terms of a single patent drawing or illustration, but rather in terms of however many patent drawings are necessary in order to demonstrate what you have invented. Most patent applications have at least several sheets of drawings, with each sheet routinely having multiple views of the invention. You may need to show various views (top, bottom, right, left, etc.), or you might show what is called an exploded view, where the elements are suspended in space and if you envision them collapsing inward the device would become whole. You may also want to break down the invention and show drawings of one or more of the component parts. In my experience most patent application do not have as many drawings as they could have, which is a mistake.

Completely Describe Your Invention in a Patent Application

Simply said, a patent application is only as good as what is included within the application, and general or vague descriptions do nothing more than guarantee that no patent will ever issue. Beyond that, how can you realistically do a patent search on a first level, vague articulation of an invention? At present there have been more than 8.7 million U.S. utility patents granted and over 700,000 design patents granted. I can guarantee that if you vaguely describe your invention it will be easy to find prior art that will be exactly what you have described. Of course, when you see it you will say: “that isn’t anything like my invention.” But if you say your invention is multi-purpose knife, for example, and that is all you say then any multi-purpose knife would be prior art that would prevent you from obtaining a patent.

Working with Patent Illustrations to Create a Complete Disclosure

What you are looking at here is something that is similar to a Big Mac because it has two beef patties, which are identified by reference numeral 10. It isn’t quite a Big Mac through because there is no special sauce, and there are tomatoes 18 added. Having a drawing like this makes it easy to describe the hamburger, but it also makes it easy to describe more than what is shown in the drawing. Allow me to illustrate. In a patent application you might describe this drawing as follows…