Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m J.D. Houvener, the host of the Bold Today’s Show, where you, the inventor, entrepreneur, or business owner, get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place. We’re on day two of talking about space, that’s outer space for any of you who might not have thought about that right away. This is the technology and innovations that you might be working on to help get us to the limits of space, right? This boundary, this place we can’t see when we’re walking around the earth. There’s an amazing abundance of knowledge out there, whether it be through planets, through different types of asteroids, colonies. We’re trying to figure out what’s out there, and we’re just scratching the surface. So, it’s a really exciting place to study. It’s one of the passions I have, the most interesting subject matter that I can think of.
So, your challenge today is to share with the world, share with everybody, everyone you know below about what inspires you about space, what might scare you about space, what is it that gets you thrilled about building technology that will impact the world. Today, we’re still looking at NASA and their public domain website. This is found at technology.nasa.gov/publicdomain. When we look at this patent we found, I found yesterday, I talked about the initial technology, which is a rocket engine. This rocket engine is a turbocharger, and it does what it does based on condensing and expanding in the heat exchanger environment. We’re not going to look at the claims today; we’re gonna look at that tomorrow and the next day. Today, we’re just gonna look at the cover page. It’s important to be able to look at published patents so that you can learn to read them, understand what’s behind them so you can build on that technology.
This first cover page explains really basic things like what is the date of patenting, right? So, you can see right in the upper right-hand corner, March 8, 2011, that was the date the patent got what’s the issuance mean? Well, that’s when it became enforceable. So, should you know if NASA was going to try to enforce their patents and prevent someone or an entity from making, using, selling, or importing a rocket engine like this into their commerce and into the world, they could. And they could do it beginning March 8, 2011. Any time before that, it still was pending, and the rights hadn’t actually issued.
So, that first day, they’re finally able to exclude anyone else from making, using, selling, or importing into the U.S. Another key date you’ll see off to the left a little bit is a much earlier date. This is the filing date and when they first filed the application. It was way back in 2007, excuse me, 2007, you’ll see that. So, it’s like it’s a huge gap. I mean, you can count the number of years we’re talking almost six years in pendency. Because of that, there was some delay caused by just arguing back and forth, right? That’s called prosecution when the inventor and the examiner sort of have to come to terms unto what scope of rights are going to be issued under the claim set. But there’s also some delay that’s caused by the Patent Office itself and the government. Sometimes, they sit on their laurels, and they just got too busy to evaluate this patent. So, any time period that the patent sits on the desk of an examiner that actually will be granted back to the rights holder. So, you can see just above the filing date is a discussion about how 899 days will be given back to the inventor on top of that filing date. Normally, an inventor would get 20 years of exclusionary privileges from the 2007 filing date. Well, an additional 899 days are going to be added to that. So, they’re actually going to get twenty years beyond plus 899 days anyway.
So, hope this tidbit of patent knowledge helped you out and inspired you to build or read patent documents with some gusto, right? Be able to actually just see what they’re talking about, understand what some of the terms mean. It’s important about how you innovate in your technology area and move forward. So, thank you for tuning in for this version of the Bold Today’s Show. Hope you’ll have a wonderful day. Bye-bye.