Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi, my name is J.D. Houvener, I’m the host of the Bold Today’s Show where you, the inventor and entrepreneur, get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place. Well, happy Monday everybody. Hope you’re excited to get the week started and what I want to talk about again is this idea of emphasizing your relationship, right? You’re all inventors, you’re all working on building relationships, and the best way to do that is smile, right? Smiling, do you remember it from your mother, you heard it from your grandmother, grandfather, whoever? This is age-old, but smiling is so powerful.
I focus on doing this in the Bold Today Show every day in my professional life, but as entrepreneurs and business owners, we’re just hard-headed, right? We’re just type-A, probably trying to get the job done, get things written, move on to the next task, and we get so serious. Smiling makes a huge difference in your own body’s chemistry. You make a big difference in who you meet and how they interact and feel about you. So, it’s a nice breath of fresh air reminder to just smile, alright? So, your challenge today, next time you’re in the bathroom washing your hands and you look up at the mirror, don’t just frown at yourself, right? Smile, because it’s uplifting to your own body and to those around you when you walk out and take on the day.
We’re still working on this invention, right? Shawn Smith out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, he’s taking center stage here. We’re on day three talking about this, we’ve got two more episodes we’re talking about this invention. This is our toolbox with integrated compressed air lines, air tubes that come out of it. If you’ve been following along, we just talked yesterday about the Oath and Declaration, and we’re going to show that to you today. Remember, the law we’re working on is CFR 37 CFR 1.41 B, and this statute requires the oath to be completed or the declaration.
So, what you see up here, this is the declaration form, and you can look at it right there and zoom in on it. Pause this video if you want to take a minute and really evaluate what’s there. It’s not that complicated, though. There are two main boxes to check at the top, whether it’s regarding a Patent Cooperation Treaty or if he’s declaring his own invention. So, it’s the top box that’s checked in this case. A major aspect of the Declaration that I wanted to point out with you today is that what goes along with it is the signature at the bottom.
And what you might have thought when you thought signature is that it’s a handwritten signature and freeform handwriting. But you can see that it’s just simply his name typed out with two slashes on either side, right, for two forward slashes—one at the beginning and one at the end. This is called an S signature, and it’s the way that documents are signed now that the USPTO is finally, thank goodness, gone to electronic filing. So, it’s a much easier, much more straightforward way to process the paperwork.
Shawn is able to declare this by signing it electronically and submitting it. This declaration document is in lieu of, and excuse me, this declaration document is in lieu of an oath, right? Oaths are really quite rare these days. In order to get an actual oath done, you have to go before a notary or an attorney, and it’s very rare and more cumbersome to do, as you might know. So, it’s much more preferred to do a declaration like this, and it’s what you’ll see in 90 plus percent of the applications out there.
Thank you for tuning in for this version of the Bold Today’s Show. Hope you all had a great time. Go big, go bold.