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Written by : Lupe Mcchriston |
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welcome back in our last video we talked about how ideas are worthless and one of the ways that you can actually make traction and action on your ideas is to get a patent there are lots of different types of patents I have six different patents I've filed provisional patents I've been sued by patent holders I've had patent trolls come after me I've deposed about patents and I'm here to tell you the pros and cons of getting a patent and what the process is if you're an inventor and you have an idea and you want to file for a patent so these are patent cubes from my work at Microsoft you can see thank you for your contribution a little bit about the patent law icon and Microsoft would give these as awards for people for what are called utility patents utility patents are the most basic type of patent and they protect a new type of idea or concept a novel way of doing something and these these particular patents are for work that I did on the Windows XP operating system there are four different types of patents utility patents are the most common the second type of patent is called a provisional patent and a provisional patent kind of hold to your place in line it prevents someone else from jumping ahead of you in taking that idea provisional patent is a lower-cost way of getting a patent the third type of patent is called a design patent in a design patent protects the design the look and feel of something it's not necessarily an invention but it protects how something looks and how something feels so you can imagine the look and feel of a particular car or a particular phone or particular shoe lots of companies that have a particular look and feel for their products will file a design patent to prevent knockoffs from being produced the last patent is called the plant patent unless you're building Audry - you don't really have to worry about that believe it baby it don't now if you're gonna file for a patent you're probably gonna want a patent lawyer filing patents is pretty complicated in terms of the documents that you need to produce the documents are formatted in a very particular way and a patent attorney whose experience with filing patents is going to save you time and money in the process that being said filing patents does tend to be expensive and patents can really rack up in terms of the cost lots of patent processes may cost tens of thousands of dollars so just be aware of some of these costs before jumping in and filing a patent now a couple ways that you can save money on filing a patent is by doing a little prep work before you go to your patent attorney so try to document what your invention does and how it does it write down your thoughts in plain English so it's easy to understand and if you're able to draw and illustrate some of them of how your invention works that's often helpful as well another way to save costs is by filing as what's called a micro entity if you're a solo independent inventor or if you're part of a very small company you can file for micro entity status and that saves you a little bit of money in terms of filing fees with a patent office the patent process itself can take a lot of back-and-forth even once you file a patent you can expect your patent to be rejected and then there's back and forth between your patent attorney and the patent examiner the entire process can often take as long as two or three years so just be prepared for a longer wait so because patents cost a lot of money and they take a lot of time it may not be the best thing for every small business so if you've truly invented something novel and unique something that's really unique and not out there then a patent may make sense it may protect your business from having knockoffs people stealing your idea but in many cases a patent can be a distraction so let's say you go through this process and you get a patent at the end of the day the patent is just a piece of paper and so the question is what do you want to do with this piece of paper there are three main strategies with patents the first is defensive patents and so with a defensive patent you really take that piece of paper and put it in a drawer you're honestly not doing anything you're keeping it there for defense if your company gets sued for some reason in the future you can go into that drawer and use that patent for defense so if someone's suing you for patent infringement you can say ah but I have this other patent it and I could sue you for patent infringement so why don't we all walk away and lots of companies have giant patent portfolios purely for defense to prevent other companies from suing them for patent infringement the other way to use a patent is for offense and that means going after other people who are infringing on your patent but be aware if that other company that you're suing and going after it has their own patent portfolio for defense a they could end up suing you back and B if they do see you back they could invalidate your patent making it completely worthless the third way to use a patent is for licensing and so if you're inventing a product or an idea and you don't actually want to build that product or idea but you want to license that invention to other companies to then go off and build that idea for you that's another way you can charge your licensing fee for your patent so depending on your company early-stage startups may not get a ton of early benefit from filing patents because using them defensively or offensively can be a real distraction to the core business small companies only have a limited set of resources so you may not want to spend those resources on either offensive patents or defensive patent portfolios if you do have a really amazing idea you can file a provisional patent and that kind of holds your place in line until you get better capitalization and more money and so that buys you a year of time to really figure out if you want to go file that full patent if you really have a unique design a unique visual approach to your product you can also file a design patent and those tend to be less expensive as well either way design patents provisional patents utility patents to help you set your company apart in terms of the design the products and the vision of what you're trying to build and I hope patents help you in your quest to build an amazing company I'm Gregg Ray's I focus on technology design and development and if you like that sort of thing hit subscribe thanks so much for joining me till the next one you
Thanks for your comment Tawanda Hribal, have a nice day.
- Lupe Mcchriston, Staff Member
all right everybody this is steven key and i want to thank you for watching this video the topic of this video is how to patent an idea and i want to say at the very beginning i'm not a patent attorney and i'm not giving legal advice so there you go there's my disclaimer and i'm also going to say that you cannot patent an idea but from an idea you can turn into an invention but i'm going to use the word idea but technically you cannot patent an idea it has to become an invention and i always say idea because ideas can turn into an invention so let's go the topic like i said is how to patent an idea okay wow first of all you have a great idea you've done a little bit of homework and you want to go forward and you want to protect it i want to talk about how to patent an idea first slow down don't call a patent attorney i want you to do a little homework first and i don't want you to run out and file a patent first because there's a very good chance you won't have all the information and there's a very good chance you'll learn things along the way so the best approach the number one best approach is to file a provisional patent application now the reason why i'm saying that when you file a provisional patent application it gives you patent pending status for one year it allows you to test your idea to see if anybody truly wants it it allows you to discover maybe how to make your invention a little bit better it just gives you time to really do some homework and during that year of patent-pending status you can go ahead and file another provisional patent application when you learn once you learn a little bit more and combine them together before that years out of the date when you filed the first provisional patent application so when you decide hey i've got this great idea i want patent protection you don't run out and file a patent first you're going to do a little bit of homework and you're going to file a provisional patent application all right so what should be in that you know that ppa which is short for provisional patent application all right the first thing you need to know is really your point of difference that's right because there's going to be similar ideas that are out there there there might even be prior patents that have been issued that are maybe the same as your invention maybe a little bit different so the first thing that you need to do is really to look at the landscape to see what to see if my idea has a point of difference compared to similar ideas and you can do that by doing a google image search or google shopping search and look at similar ideas that are selling now in the marketplace what you're trying to do is to determine if your idea has that wow factor compared to similar ideas on the market so that's easy to do you can also go down to the local retailer that you think your product is going to sell and just look at the products and just make sure you have a new idea that's new and novel and has a point of difference that people truly want now what you can also do is look for prior patents now i would recommend at the very beginning that you go to google patents you can type in on the internet type in google patents and you can start searching for similar inventions and you will find i can guarantee it a lot of pri it's called prior art patents that have been filed that maybe they've expired and maybe they're still valid but you're going to find inventions that are similar to yours and that's perfectly fine if you have never done a prior art search you could go online and and watch other people show you how to search you could also take a class at the uspto and learn how to search or just have fun type in certain words and see what comes up but it's not that difficult to do but you have to be able to do that homework that homework at the very beginning i call i call it studying the marketplace like and all the other educational material i provide is called step number one knowing my point of difference by looking at the market similar ideas and looking at prior patents that will tell me wow do i really have an idea that hasn't been created before and what is my point of difference all right so let's say you've done that and you've decided hey i've got a great idea no one's thought about this before all right what are the next steps now i talked about like i said the first thing you want to do is file a provisional patent application you could hire someone to do that for you you could hire a patent attorney you could hire a patent agent or like i like to say learn how to do it yourself and that's why you're watching this video i think you need to do it yourself even if you're going to hire someone later you still need to gather all the information together and do it yourself because no one's going to do it like this no one's going to first of all no one's going to care as much as you do and no one's going to do this type of homework so what do i include in my provisional patent application that maybe a patent attorney won't will not help me or maybe a patent agent won't do for me and the reason why they won't do this it's really not their job it's your job so the first thing i do like i said earlier i study the marketplace so i know my point of difference that's very very important again i know my point of difference compared to similar ideas but also my point of difference on prior paths okay so we talked about that now i like to make sure when i write a provisional patent application i talk about the problem and talk about it in plain words so people can just understand right and what's great about a provisional patent application you can write it in just simple language it doesn't have to have the legalese that's required for a non-provisional patent application so i always start with i study the marketplace i know the problem and i state it this is a problem we all have and here's my solution which is my invention pretty simple that format problem solution now what i like to add to a provisional patent application that really only you can do is add how is this going to be manufactured wow now maybe you don't know how it's going to be manufactured but you can watch a bunch of youtube videos you could call an expert in a particular field you could hire someone for an hour have them sign an nda with work for higher language in case they invent something you own but the point i'm making your idea has to be able to be manufactured at a price that the market will bear so you really have to understand a little bit about manufacturing it's not hard to do but i would love for you to include that in your provisional patent application because now it truly has value also what i would add in my provisional patent application is maybe what type of material would be used you could also do a little research and do your homework but i would add that too so i'm talking about problem talk about a solution i'm talking about maybe how to how it's going to be manufactured i'm also going to talk about maybe what type of material would be used but here's the big thing here you want to be able to protect not only your inv
Thanks matuc9 your participation is very much appreciated
- Lupe Mcchriston
About the author
I've studied knowledge policy at College of William & Mary in Williamsburg and I am an expert in agricultural economics. I usually feel crappy. My previous job was aircraft launch and recovery officer I held this position for 24 years, I love talking about anime and wood carving. Huge fan of Thich Nhat Hanh I practice gymnastics and collect barbie dolls.
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