Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone I’m JD Houvener and welcome to the bold Today Show were you the inventor entrepreneur or business owner get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place thanks for joining today and this is part two of our five-part series about discussing the services that we love and hold pulled dear and be able to serve our clients with yesterday we talked about the patentability search opinion and we talked about how it’s important in making that solid business decision about how to move forward right whether your invention is new in the whole world right making sure you know what databases and you can trust a professional like our team to take care of that make sure you’re making a good decision when you decide to put that time and money into that patent application filing today we’re talk about that application and one particular type of application called the provisional patent application you may have heard this term floated around in forms like even on a famous TV show ABC’s Shark Tank and and it’s people get confused about what the provisional patent application means and I hear the term hey I’ve got a provisional patent on that and that annoys me it probably noise every other patent attorney out there because there is no such thing as a provisional patent it is just an application for a patent so there are no rights that get invested when you just simply file an application right and so you you’ve got a wait of course until you follow the non provisional patent application send in to the examiner then they approve it and get granted that’s when rights actually get issued and you’ve got some legal authority to prevent anyone else out there in the market from making using selling or importing so what it’s like digging today a little bit about what the provisional patent application is some high-level discussion if you want to look at for more information you’ve got to go online to bold patents com there you’re going to find a lot of information of course on the website what you’ll see is a link to our book all bold ideas to inventors guide to patents and in there I’m just gonna make a quick reference to chapter 14 where a deep discussion is had about what the difference is between the provision and a non-provisional patent application so tomorrow we’re going to talk more about non-traditional applications but today we’ll spend a little bit more time on Provisionals all right so at a high level a provisional application is just that it’s a placeholder its main objective is to help you with sending in a filing date because based on the law as it is now it is not first-to-invent right there could be some opps out there in the world that has this same invention as you and what matters is not who invented first but who files it first so that’s what the provisional filing date is for and in many cases that’s why someone would submit it provisional because they’re not quite sure what the claims are in a provisional you need to submit a specification which is of course the full written description of an invention and that must be enabled per Section 112 of the law and the written description must be in such a description such that someone like you an adventurer in your field needs to go to pick up that written description along with the drawings and be able to make and use your invention don’t take me lightly the description needs to be in great detail but the provisional is informal it the drawings can actually be hand-drawn and it can be put together in a in a fairly streamlined fashion without too much rigor as I said before there’s no claims in a provisional and the drawings can also be informal so it takes our team about half as much effort as it would to do a non-provisional patent application which we’ll get to later so the key to a provisional is that you have up to one year from filing in the provisional to follow it up with a non provisional patent application that one went one year window is undone extendable you’ve got to make sure you file that within one year if it’s an application that you want to maintain if after that one year and that goes by your application gets a banned and you’ve now if you’ve published it to the public you now have no recourse to be able to claim that as your invention it’s part of the public domain still don’t let that happen to you please get with us if you have any questions and you’re ready to get going on your provisional application to bolt Patten’s calm there you’ll see a link to schedule your own 30 minute consultation with one of our patent attorneys I’m JD Houvener on the host of the bolt today’s show hope held our wonderful day go big go bold
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