Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone my name is JD Houvener your host the bold today’s show are you the inventor entrepreneur or business owner get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place all right we’re just starting a new series this week happy Monday to all those out there what I want to talk about this week is pre filing pre patent application filing what are those considerations you should make as a business owner thinking about making that big leap of faith and a huge investment that patent application process is involved in one of the things you should be thinking about before you take that big step that’s we’re talking about in this whole five-part series starting today so let’s think about what you should be doing in terms of wine why you might not want to file right away what are the things that could prevent you and could actually help determine that patents is not the best way to go all right let’s go right through the list number one is the statutory bars in patent law there are what called the statutory bars meaning if you have publicized or sold your invention more than one year ago in the United States it now belongs to the public domain that’s a huge statutory bar and there’s really no exceptions to that time period and so if you’ve run up against that one year and you’ve gone past it your patent is not going to be eligible and it could be invalidated even if you were to file the application so it’ll be a whole waste of time and money going through that process the second one could be from a business point of view and if you’ve done your diligence and done the research the market in the industry for your product or service and you found that really there’s not that big of a market out there you know even if what you’ve got is somewhat innovative and you’ve got an improvement on the current technology the market the overall size the market just doesn’t really lend itself to a new player and there’s not that much demand for that product another great reason to not really want to go down the patent route even though you could another issue that that’s going to come into play is the the fact you haven’t yet thought about what might happen if the product is unenforceable right so even once you get the patent granted if you’re not going to be able to see people infringing your patent this happens a lot in terms of manufacturing and methods that are used to let’s say make a product when I think of a lot of cuz my background at Boeing is the processes that are involved in making the airplane for example the 787 is made of composite material and so all the different processes that happen internally to manufacture at the proper temperatures and heat the carbon fiber at the right speeds to get it to mold just right those types of processes while certainly patent-eligible patentable may not be the best fit for moving forward because they’re not going to be able to be detected you would have to be inside your competitors factory to be able to see it that they’re actually performing your patented method so unless you can prove by the end product that oh I can tell that they used my process then you’re probably likely gonna want to protect it under trade secret law so that’s the biggie right making sure you put the brakes on early in the process think about this all these different decision points pre-filing and that’s what we help you with as patent attorneys as your advocate we don’t want to waste your money we don’t want you to end up in a bad financial decision position rather down the line so get a hold of us go to our website at bold patents calm or give us a call at
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