Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m J.D. Houvener, your host of the Bold Today Show – for you, the inventor, entrepreneur, or business owner – get your daily dose of inspiration so you can make the world a better place! I have a Monday again. This is awesome! I’m excited to share this 10 part series showing you all of your options all right? I know you all – inventors out there, entrepreneurs – when you thought about bringing that next product to the market, and what’s it gonna take? You know you’ve really got to consider all of your options.
I know every single one of you out there is savvy – you know you’ve really thought hard. I mean you’ve showed up to educational programs like this, the Bold Today Show, because you’re hungry – you want to learn more! And so I’m proud of you for that. And because I know that, I want to make sure we explore every single option that’s out there for moving your product forward in terms of patenting. So we’re gonna start this week and we’ll do next week with the patent applications. This week is about the patentability search and what your options are in terms of when you do a patent search, or if you do it all.
So today, we’re going to dedicate the discussion about the option of not doing a search at all – yep, that’s an option! I don’t recommend it and we’re gonna go through all the reasons why today. Okay, so let’s think about the very first part of patent consideration – is your patent even eligible? Do you know if it meets the requirements for novelty, non-obviousness and utility? By not doing a search you’re not gonna know. You won’t know that because you won’t know the law and you won’t know what else is out there to begin with.
And so what’s interesting is even though you may have something that you think is new, by not doing a search at all it’s sort of obvious to say someone else could have already done it. A simple Google search could pull up a result that “Oh my gosh there’s already been done before!” Maybe not exactly like yours but the 99% aspect, the heart of your invention, is hard out there. You’ve got to do some level of searching.
Let’s take a look at the second criteria – you know, are there are there advisors they’re gonna be helping you and be able to get this decision pointed out? Again, if you don’t do a search at all you’re not bringing on anyone else like a counselor or advisor third party. You’re simply saying “It’s not worth my time.” And so by ignoring that big aspect of taking some time and doing the diligence upfront, you are potentially lining yourself up for a major hurdle by going into, for example, the patent application process without having done a search.
You are likely spending thousands of dollars – right, wasting your money and time – writing an application or hiring someone to write an application without having done that homework down in front. The examiner is going to go do their own search, okay? And so they’re gonna come back with a list of results and you don’t want to be surprised by that list! And when they go look at for prior art – which is basically any publication that’s been out there in your industry – they’re gonna be able to cite specific references from any country in the world including the US of course on patent documents and non patent literature documents too. That includes anything everyone’s ever published online – quite vast! And so this search is comprehensive. If you don’t have foresight into what the examiner is going to be looking at you don’t really know how to write your application to go around that prior art.
So by having done a search you’ve set yourself up for failure. Look I don’t mean to be too harsh. I know a lot of people out there are trying to just bootstrap and do that our best. This is not a point to skip doing your own diligence. Doing some work upfront to get a search done is super important. We’re going to talk about tomorrow what it means to do at least something – by doing your own search. But again looking like looking at that and saying “Gosh is it really worth my own time? Is it the best effort, best best use of my time and money to do the search myself or might it be better to hire someone to do it?”
Well if you’ve enjoyed this session please please take a look at us online and give me further questions – please book a free 30-minute consultation at boldIP.com. You’ll be happy to talk with you about the patent search process and what’s involved there. I’m your host, J.D. Houvener of the Bold Today Show – Go big, go bold!