Posts Tagged: "provisional patents"

Vidal Designates Precedential PTAB Decision on Provisionals as Prior Art Under AIA

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal today designated as precedential a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision from March of this year that held a precedential U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruling on prior art determinations for provisional applications applies only to pre-America Invents Act (AIA) patents.

Can You Refile a Provisional Patent Application?

The question that we receive most frequently from inventors, usually independent inventors, relates to whether a provisional patent application can be refiled with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).  Before giving the correct answer, it is critically important for everyone to understand that if a provisional patent application is refiled it may become impossible for a patent to ever be obtained, period.  Can a provisional patent application be refiled? The short, easy answer to the question is yes, of course you can refile the provisional application. The USPTO will be happy to have you refile the application, take your filing fee, and send you a new filing receipt. The problem for you, as an inventor, however, is the consequence of refiling a provisional application. So, while it may be very easy to do, and seem like you’ve just extended the life of your original provisional application, that is precisely NOT what has happened, and you may have – indeed likely have – made it impossible to ever obtain a patent anywhere in the world.

Four Things C-Suite Executives Need to Know About Patents

Executives that have decision making capacity within any innovation-based organization, whether a young startup or a Fortune 500 corporation, almost universally have little or no familiarity with patents from a legal perspective. Sometimes these leaders also have little familiarity with science or technology, and are hired because they are particularly adept in leading a rapidly growing company with hopes of an initial public offering (IPO), or because they have shown a particular facility with raising ever increasing rounds of capital from investors, or for their ability to make returns to early investors on their capital investments. Whatever the case, after a high-tech startup has outgrown the founders as being the top leaders in the C-suite, it is commonplace for the top decision makers in those high-tech companies to be far more familiar with the business and marketplace realities facing technology companies than the actual science and technology that made them high-growth darlings in the first place.

Protecting an Idea: Can Ideas Be Patented or Protected?

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.

Filing a patent application is still a smart decision for inventors

I’m not alone in thinking that at least a provisional patent application is extremely important. Stephen Key, the preeminent inventor coach in the United States, advises all his students to at a minimum file a provisional patent application on their inventions in order to establish what he calls “perceived rights.” Key’s strategy, which has been successfully followed by hundreds of his students who do find licensing deals, is to place that marker in the sand and define an invention with a provisional patent application.