Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi, everyone! I’m JD Houvener, your host of the Bold Today Show, where you, the inventor, entrepreneur, and business owner, get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place. All right, we’re here, and we’re talking about project planning. It’s spring! Yesterday, we talked about the project you’ve got in mind, right? What you’re gonna take on and tackle—maybe cleaning the garage, putting in a new garden, growing some new vegetables, whatever it is. I want you to put a plan together, and your challenge of the day is just that—put five milestones down, break your project into five little steps, write it down. It’s elementary, but a lot of people actually don’t plan their projects and often goof up and have to redo tons of things. Given that, this is one thing I struggle with a lot too, so I’m gonna try to take my own advice and follow up on this challenge myself too. Put in the comments below what’s step one for you. What’s the first step to your project? Share it with your comments below.
Okay, so we’re still talking about Shawn Smith out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Shawn’s invention is—if you missed it yesterday—it’s a toolbox with integrated airlines for an air compressor to do tools, you know, sanding, grinding, those sorts of things. It’s all integrated into one box, and we have an image up here now that you can see to kind of recognize it. Hopefully, if you did your homework, you dug in and pulled up that patent itself because we’re gonna be talking a lot about the application process that went into place—what steps had to be taken to get that properly submitted to the USPTO.
Today, we’re gonna be talking about the oath and declaration. The oath and declaration is a very important part of the process for the inventor to make a declaration that they’re the inventor, that they have no other inventors, no other co-inventors that helped them with it, and they’ve fully disclosed everything about the invention and all the prior art that goes with it. It’s kind of a triple effect, and this is all captured under 37 CFR 1.41(b). This part of the statute requires an inventor to disclose all the prior art—meaning all the other patents or publications that they’ve used to sort of get the knowledge that was the foundation for their inventing. Right? They may have made an improvement on an old toolbox they thought about using airlines that are aerial compressor lines that are connected to rail—whatever it is that Shawn Smith had—he had to disclose to the Patent Office as part of his declaration. In addition to that, this part of the statute requires that the inventor’s attorney—if they performed a patentability search—they have to disclose all of those prior art pieces and citations to the examiner. This helps speed the process up, and the examiner’s going to find these anyway, and it’s your duty and obligation to disclose what’s out there—what already exists. So, this part of the process is usually handled under an electronic signature, and so tomorrow we’re going to take a look at the actual document that Shawn Smith signed.
Until then, what I want you to do is go take a look at the USPTO website again, pull up this patent if you haven’t done it already. We’re talking more about the patent documents that went into making the application. Okay, well, get started on that first project. I know it’s where spring is close, and then you got your big spring projects online. I’m excited to read about what you’re working on, and I’ll show you what I’m working on as well. Take care, everyone, and have a great day. Go big, go bold!