Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m J.D. Houvener, and welcome to the Bold Today Show, where you, the inventor, entrepreneur, or business owner, get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place. How you found us, happy Monday! I’m so glad you’re tuning in today. Believe it or not, today is actually a really fun holiday. It’s an unofficial holiday, but it’s “Talk Like Yoda” day. So, during today’s session, talk like Yoda, I will.
We’re going to talk about this week, in particular, about the different formats that we’re going to be presenting patent services right through our website at boldpatents.com. You’ll see we’ve got a ton of information, but I wanted to boil down the top five services that we offer to make sure you fully understand what in the world they are. And if you think they might be a good fit for where you’re at in your invention progress, invention life cycle, let’s have a deeper discussion. So, if you have any questions today, please feel free to email us or put in the comments below. I would love to see some interaction there, and I’ll personally make sure, commit to you, that I’ll get back to you within 24 hours of you leaving a comment.
The first topic today, one of the things I love discussing and I love providing for clients, is called the patentability search opinion, a PSO (patentability search opinion). And if you want to learn much more about this before I dig in, you want to go visit our book, and for all of our clients, we’ve given you a copy, but here it is. This is “Bold Ideas: The Inventor’s Guide to Patents.” This is available on our website for free. So, get your own electronic version today. If you want a hard copy, just let us know; we’ll send you one.
Patent search opinions are detailed in Chapter 8 of the book, and I even give you some good examples in Chapter 27 in the back of additional resources for you to dig in and do some additional research on your own and do the diligence and the table before you come an approach a patent attorney. So, a patent search opinion, the main essence of this effort is to make sure that before we spend all the time and money in putting an application together and to spin it to the Patent Office, now we’ve done our work. We have put ourselves in the examiner’s shoes to do our best job and understand whether your invention is new, whether it’s non-obvious, and whether it has utility to merit patentability.
So, we act as much like the examiners we can to determine all this information upfront to try to save you money and time. It’s you, the inventor, that should be working on your invention, bringing it to market. But we don’t want you to go through all that effort of building up a manufacturing facility, putting a supply chain into effect, paying the attorneys to get your applications submitted to just find out that it’s already been done before. And under the AIA (American Invents Act) passed in 2013, worldwide prior art can act as a reference to reject your patent application. So, somewhere in Russia, somewhere in Germany or Australia, anyone out there that published documents, the examiner could find those. And if they’re on point exactly or even close to what your invention is doing, they can reject it as either not novel or as an obvious iteration of something that’s already been done before.
So, it’s a wonderful opinion we like doing because it gives the inventor the best information so they can make a good business decision whether to move forward or not. So again, please read more in the “Bold Ideas” book on our website as well at boldpatents.com. If any of you have questions about what a patent search is, what are the costs, please book a free 30-minute consultation. We’d love to talk with you. I’m your host J.D. Houvener of the Bold Today Show. Go big, go bold.