How to improve patent quality [Expert Guide]

Last updated : Sept 19, 2022

How can patents be improved?

1. Make sure your invention: Has patentable subject matter. Is novel (new)
2. Hire an attorney (highly recommended)
3. Prepare a provisional patent application and file it with the USPTO.
4. Prepare a nonprovisional application and file it with the USPTO.
5. Track the status of your patent application.

What affects the quality of a patent?

Patents that undergo numerous office actions and claim rejections forces the applicant to refine the patents. The more refined the patents, the less likely they are to face post-grant validity challenges. Therefore, the more exhaustive the patent prosecution process, the higher the quality of the patents.

What is a patent quality?

The legal definition of patent quality – a valid invention right that permits the holder to sue in order to exclude an alleged infringer from practicing the invention – provides limited direction.

How do you determine the quality of a patent?

In order to measure the patent quality, many measuring indicators system have been developed. Some scholars use simple indicators to measure the patent quality, such as maintenance rate (Schankerman and Pakes, 1987), number of citations (Henderson et al., 1998), grant ratio, citation to science articles, etc.

What is an improvement patent called?

A utility patent is a patent that covers the creation of a new or improved—and useful—product, process, or machine. A utility patent, also known as a "patent for invention," prohibits other individuals or companies from making, using, or selling the invention without authorization.

How do you motivate a patent?

1. Patent Filing and its Importance. Increase Patent Awareness in Organisations. Encourage Innovation of Employees. Make Organisational resources more Accessible. The Role of Effective Talent Acquisition. Competitive Research and Analysis.
2. Conclusion.

What are low quality patents?

By definition, a low quality patent system is characterized by large numbers of errors in the patent-granting process.

Which all qualities should an idea have in order to get patent from UST?

• Novelty. This means that your invention must not have been made public – not even by yourself – before the date of the application.
• Inventive step. This means that your product or process must be an inventive solution.
• Industrial applicability.

Can you patent a puzzle?

Games can be protected by patent. You get some protection through copyright, but only on things like artwork and the precise text of the rules; someone could copy the ideas of the game with different artwork and not violate your copyright. You would need a patent in each country you want to protect it in.

What is patent indicator?

Patent indicators are a key measure of innovative output, as they reflect the inventive performance of countries, regions, technology, etc. They are also used to measure diffusion of ideas and the level of internationalisation and international collaboration across countries.

What are the 4 types of patents?

• Utility patent. This is what most people think of when they think about a patent.
• Provisional patent.
• Design patent.
• Plant patent.

What are the 3 types of patents?

What kind of patent do you need? There are three types of patents - Utility, Design, and Plant. Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or compositions of matters, or any new useful improvement thereof.

How do you modify a patent?

Unfortunately, under United States patent law you can not amend the patent to include the new subject matter reflecting the improvement you made to the invention. You will have to file a new patent application for the improvement to the invention instead of filing an amendment to the patent.

What are five parts of a patent specification?

• Title of the patent invention.
• Background of the invention.
• Summary of the invention/ Object of the Nvention.
• Explanation if any of the patent drawings.
• Description of the invention.
• Patent Claims.

What are the main objectives of patents?

Patents, technology and development One of the main functions of the patent system is to foster technological innovation by providing an incentive for research and development. The patent system also works to diseminate technical information and promote technology transfer.

What makes patent patentable?

There are three main requirements for something to be patentable. These are 'novelty' and 'inventiveness' and that the invention is not excluded subject matter. Novelty means that the invention must be new in the sense that the exact thing has not been non-confidentially disclosed before.

Is Sudoku patented?

Sudoku is a puzzle game from Japan that captivated the U.S. puzzle market beginning two years ago, but only because of a fortuitous lack of foresight. The first marketer and self-proclaimed originator of Sudoku, Maki Kaji, didn't expect such enormous success. So his business, Nikoli, never trademarked the game.

Can I patent a game idea?

deas (and algorithms) cannot be patented. Mental processes cannot be patented. The rules of a game cannot be patented (unless there is a sufficiently inventive concept to “transform” the rules into patent-eligible subject matter … but what does that even mean?).

Can I patent a card game?

Can you even file a patent for a card game? Yes. You can patent a card game. You are able to patent certain aspects of a card game that will allow you to have a legal monopoly on this game for a given period of time.

Are patents a measure of innovation?

Patents thus provide a good measure of technologically new knowledge as defined above. Several studies have recently used patents as a measure of innovation performance (e.g., Dutta and Weiss, 1997; Henderson and Cockburn, 1994).

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in an earlier video we talked about the patent examination process and we learned that the chances of getting your patent application issued are actually pretty high but what else can we do what are some legal hacks to help us raise those chances to improve those chances of getting our patent application allowed stay tuned in this video we're going to talk about that today hi my name is john farrell i'm a silicon valley patent attorney welcome back to my channel one of the simple things that you can do as a first step is to do a product search or image search of a product that would contain your invention before filing your patent jump on google and look for products that are similar or inventions that might be similar to what you're claiming if it's a device or a machine search for the machine and as i mentioned don't forget to do an image search as well because sometimes there's lots to be learned by looking at photographs and images of other inventions and it might give you some ideas of some improvements that you can make when writing your patent application now if the internet product search comes up empty you might consider conducting a patent search going online and looking for patents that are related to your invention this will help a lot not only in determining whether your invention is patentable but in writing your patent application and constructing the claims that you'll be submitting to the patent office for examination now something else that will really help the allowability of your patent application is to get some professional help either in writing the application itself or at least reviewing the application that you've written writing patent applications can be tricky it takes years to learn to do them well and it may be that you just can't afford to hire a patent attorney to write your patent application for you but at least if you can have a patent attorney review your application before you file it and of course the patent claims at the end of a patent application are so important and it's really a good idea to get some help with these if there's any way possible now another idea for improving your chances of allowance and i recently did a youtube video on this is to avoid kitchen sink applications in your application make your application really focused make it clear what your invention is specifically the invention that you're trying to get patented don't include a lot of extraneous ideas and extraneous inventions it just slows the patent examiner down it causes confusion it makes your patent examination process take longer and cost more be very specific small focused patent applications are much easier to get through the patent office than a kitchen sink collection of a large number of disparate ideas another thing that you can do to really improve your chances of getting your patent allowed is to early on engage in a dialogue with the examiner as soon as you receive the first office action back from the examiner contact the examiner and request a phone interview to discuss his examination findings and also proposed amendments that you have to overcome his rejections he or she will really appreciate talking with you learning more about your invention to make their examination process easier they can do a much more efficient examination if they get a good idea of exactly what it is you're trying to claim an examiner interview is a great idea for speeding up the examination process if your patent examination gets bogged down if the examiner doesn't get you it's perfectly fine to ask the examiner if you can schedule an examiner interview including the supervisor having the supervisor in during the interview adds a second opinion but you want to do this in a non-confrontational way it's not like talking to customer service the goal here is that you want to have a common understanding of what's being claimed and what's in the prior art and reach some agreement as to how you can advance your patent application to allowance this is really in everybody's best interest the patent office does want to allow your patent application but they may not just quite understand what it is that distinguishes your invention from inventions that are already stored in their warehouse now there's another resource if you really get stuck with the examiner and the examiner supervisor and you just can't make progress you might consider bringing in the patent ombudsman the ombudsman is there to help as a liaison between inventors and the patent examining core they can be super helpful and as i said if you really get stuck the ombudsman might be a good resource to reach out to and of course there's always the opportunity to file an appeal if you've just run out of ideas with the examiner and you really feel like the examiner is just flat out wrong it's possible and often very helpful to appeal your case to a senior panel of patent examiners okay those are my legal hacks today for improving your chances of getting your patent application allowed if you have any other ideas please share them with us in the comments section below thanks so much for joining me today see you next time

Thanks for your comment Vonnie Urata, have a nice day.
- Wilton Sass, Staff Member

well thank you for joining us um this is a a panel for patent quality week which is kicked off on monday and we're going to be discussing the importance of patent quality both in the system and and how how to avoid bad patents getting in the system in the first place um so with me today i have a a great panel uh pulled together that represents i think some of the most important aspects of the discussion patent and that is some of the the tech side of the debate as well as the debate on the pharmaceutical side because these are two sectors of the economy where patents weigh in fairly heavily and they can actually have a a good role or a bad role depending on how how the patent system is is enforced and played out so today i have some some guests here i have david jones from the the high tech inventors alliance um who has been in in the patent world for quite some time uh daniel takash from the niskanen center who has also been working on patents and and their their role in uh how to how to make uh efficient allocations of resources in the in within the patent system uh preet christelle from imac who does a great deal of work and important work on the pharmaceutical side of of patents and how that impacts patients and consumers and matthew lane who is the head of the coalition against patent abuse so what i want to do just to kick things off and and i'll just go go around the horn and talk about patent quality from your perspective and why it's an important issue and dave i guess we'll start with you that sounds great so you know i get frustrated sometimes with dc conversations where people seem to say oh patent quality doesn't matter and the only thing that matters is getting a patent in the hands of an inventor because that's going to drive innovation um you know the goal for these people i think is to get you know make patents cheap and easy to get for inventors which i think is is half the system but not the goal of the system right and has some real costs and real problems associated with it right and then a lot of times the assumption is oh well you know if we grant a few too many patents or granted you know patents of not ideal quality it's just gonna cost a few few big corporate defendants a little bit of extra money to to defend the lawsuits and that's not a big deal i have a very different view on patent quality you know when i when an invalid patent is issued by the patent office that usually means that the patent is issued for something that doesn't qualify as an invention because it's not new right and in turn that means that someone other than the original inventor is getting a patent that's a fundamental problem if a patent is granted to the wrong person it can't create an incentive for the actual inventor for the right person to engage in innovation so so it's just fundamental to the patent system to be able to distinguish between new and old inventions and identify the correct inventor i mean it really the i guess the way to put it is the patent system can't work like a kid's soccer league right if everybody gets a participation award the incentive it creates is to participate so you know if the goal is to have more applications and more patents then then run it like a kid's soccer league if the goal is to actually drive innovation then patent quality is absolutely fundamentally the the system literally can't work without it all right thanks dave um dan sure thank you so much for having me and um happy patent quality week everyone so there are a number of angles to uh justifying the patent system as a whole but in the spirit of patent quality week i want to take the justification for the patent system as a way to signify quality because that is one of the standalone justifications given for the patent system that is to say if all of the arguments for and against were perfectly balanced than if it were a signal of quality that would tip the scales in favor of the patent system or if nothing you know elsewhere on the table that would justify a patent system now there's the question of how we design a system that simply functions as a signal of quality rather than getting all the other costs associated with the system that's a conversation for another day but i think if we're going to view the patent system as a way to signify the quality of invention as a seal of approval uh as as a a grant from the government to signify that you satisfy a number of important requirements i think there are two important caveats that have to come with that if we want to say this is the reason or at least one of the reasons we have a patent system first we need to make sure we get it right on the front end in terms of the inventions that we are giving if a a patent granted turns out to not be subject matter eligible or if the patent granted is in fact not novel or it wasn't um non-obvious based on the state of the prior art uh well then that is is bad not just um because you've given out a grant of exclusivity that can be enforced against others that should not have been granted um excuse me but also to a certain degree it is unfair to the person who got the patent in the first place uh in the first place because they went forward thinking they had a good idea that it later turned out uh they did not so that's bad for the justification for the patent system because it turns out in this case it wasn't a signal of quality and i think the second and more and broader reason we should care about patents as a signal of quality is that depending on how we set the bar for what you need to do in order to get a patent that indicates our priorities from uh an industrial policy perspective that indicates what we want to do do we want to make the bar for getting a patent relatively low so that we can have all sorts of software patents or minor incremental i'm hesitant to even call them improvements just tweaks to pharmaceuticals do we want money going after those changes improvements whatever or do we want to design a system where there's a relatively high bar so things that are truly new and that truly move the ball forward in terms of invention and progress are able to get those patents so where we set the bar matters how hot how high we said it matters and that's the other important implication for patent quality all right thanks dan uh preethi sure i'll share my perspective from the perspective of a patient advocate so i've spent many years working with families and patients who can't afford their medication i've seen firsthand what the impact is on families who can't afford their medication it prevents people from being able to go to work it prevents people from you know providing their families with other basic necessities whether that's food or paying the rent or sending their kid to school in many cases we see people's health deteriorate people have reported you know loss of life in our country in america in 2022 because people couldn't afford their medication and so when i think about the patent system it is one pillar you know in the entire medicine system from r d all the way through to health care delivery but it's an important one because

Thanks Phil your participation is very much appreciated
- Wilton Sass

About the author

Wilton Sass

I've studied social geography at Illinois College in Jacksonville and I am an expert in sound and music computing. I usually feel energetic. My previous job was dry wall installer I held this position for 4 years, I love talking about surfing and harmonica. Huge fan of Michael Bubl+� I practice kickboxing and collect numismatics.