Looking for someone with experience in the patent process to help with my personal project.
Call or text James at 214-675-8888
Contact a patent lawyer. I don’t care what anyone tells you, it will be worth the time and money if you are serious about it.
I highly recommend Fullbright and Jaworski, have actual past experience with them.
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Thanks for the information.
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I 100% agree! My dad got something patented a few years ago and used a lawyer. With all the hoops the patent examiner made him go through and all the back and forth with the patent lawyer he used, it made a HUGE difference having a lawyer.
You will probably regret applying for a patent if you don’t use a patent lawyer.
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I have 10 US Patents and over 40 International Patents, I am one of the inventors listed on these but Texas Instruments (TI) owns them. I was the one that worked directly with the Patent Lawyers on all of them. Of course, TI has some deep pockets to pay for these lawyers but they were worth it.
Sometimes an idea is not worth spending $10K in lawyer fees for a Patent. An initial meeting with the Patent lawyer will tell you if it is worth it or not to start with. Perhaps a Utility Patent, orTrade Secret is easier, or other format. Remember, just because you have a Patent you still need to monitor it to prevent it from being stolen from you…and possible litigation may not be worth it. Some big company like Amazon (as an example) could just walk all over you, tie you up in court for years until you give up and go broke…and legally walk away with your idea. If you as the owner do not enforce the Patent, then you loose it.
A Patent lawyer will assist you in creating a powerful, legal, and air-tight patent, one that can not be easily broken. One of my Patents took 2 years to agree on just the name of the Patent, the technical content was agreed on way before that. Definitely a more powerful Patent just with the name alone.
Go check it out, US Patent #5,526,051 “Digital Television System” which was the start of HDTV as we know it today. Just because of the name, every Patent associated with any form of Digital TV or accessory must reference this one Patent. Ca-Ching…TI makes more money every day.
I cannot offer you any additional advice. Good Luck on your idea.
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I wrote my own Provisional Patent Application, paid $140 on line at USPTO.gov to secure my application date and prevent anyone, include possibly any fake patent attorney, from stealing my idea. Then, I have 1 year to make sure my idea works before talking to a patent attorney.
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I began a provisional patent years ago on a different project…I would love to pick your brain a bit if you will give me the opportunity. Would you mind texting me?
Awesome… thanks so much for sharing your experience!
Sounds like René Grossman to me …
Fond days.
You actually have significantly less time than that - you have one year to file a “normal” patent application to keep the priority date of your provisional. That time includes any time it takes to find an attorney, negotiate an agreement, conduct research and have the application written. I’d begin talking to an attorney no later than six to eight months after the provisional is filed.
Think long and hard about whether a patent is worth the expense and trouble. Many patents are easily worked around and in any case, don’t prevent anyone determined to infringe. What the patent buys you is the right to sue someone for infringing. A patent infringement suit can easily cost a million dollars or more.
Depending on what you’re patenting, there is one upside to having a patent that might very well make it worth the money: Amazon has a streamlined intellectual property dispute process for patented products. Short version is: In case of alleged infringement, each side puts up $4,000. The dispute is referred to a patent attorney who renders an opinion on whether or not infringement is happening. If it is, the infringing product is removed from the platform. The “winner” gets their $4k back and the lawyer keeps the $4k from the “loser”. The process cannot be appealed but does not affect the right of either party to later go to court.
Most of the time, what an “inventor” has developed isn’t patentable; or if it is, the scope of the patent he can get is fairly meaningless. You can do your own patent research at uspto.gov. Start there.
The bigger question is whether you have something truly marketable. The world does not beat a path to your door when you invent a better mousetrap.
Look into whether what you have might be better protected by a design patent than a utility patent – since design patents are easier to get.
The risk to filing a provisional patent is that you lose your rights completely if you don’t get the actual, expensive patent application filed by the one-year-deadline (assuming you made public disclosures after filing the provisional). On the other hand, if you keep this thing completely secret, you can take your time so long as someone else doesn’t file the patent application first.
There are easy ways to lose your rights by not keeping your technology sufficiently secret prior to the patent application date. Research that so you know what not to do.
Mmmmm. I have serious doubts about the utility of design patents (pun intended), with respect to functional objects. They don’t protect anything functional at all. There is a cool device a guy created from die-cut and folded cardboard. He has a design patent on the cut and fold lines but since all of these contribute to function, his patent is worthless. Less than worthless actually, because he paid for it.
Provisional patent applications are not public and don’t act as “prior art” with respect to a subsequently filed regular application. You don’t lose your rights completely if you fail to timely file a regular application. You just lose the ability to claim the provisional’s priority date. You can still file a regular application as though you’d never filed the provisional.
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Yes, design patents are generally inferior to utility patents, but I don’t know what he has. Maybe he won’t qualify for a utility patent, or maybe design patent protection would be attainable, cost-effective, and somewhat-valuable to him commercially.
As for your second point, you can’t file a provisional patent application, make immediate public disclosures and public use/sale of your inventions, and then wait as long as you want before filing your real patent application. Filing a provisional patent application essentially starts a clock on the real patent application – which is my point – even though (as you correctly state) your own undisclosed provisional patent application isn’t prior art that c**k-blocks your real application.
Suppose one wanted to take a novel idea and give it to the world in such a way that anyone could use it, even for commercial gain, as long as they didn’t try and keep others from doing so also? How could one do that? Is that possible? I’m thinking along the lines of open software but for an conceptual idea or product.
There are a few open source hardware licenses floating around. The CERN and TAPR Open Hardware Licenses are probably close to what you’re looking for.
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Just publicize the idea. It’s then unpatentable, although someone could still patent qualifying improvements to the idea.
But keep in mind, an “idea” isn’t patentable. We’ve dreamed of the idea of flying for millions of years, but the guys who invented the mechanism got the patent. Also, some ideas aren’t patentable at all, for various reasons.
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Just to be clear though, it’s public disclosure that starts the clock, not the filing of the provisional application. Can file the provisional and sit on the idea (while continuing to make ready for sale, for example) and then file within a year using the provisional’s date or if after a year, losing that priority date.
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