Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m J.D. Houvener, your host for 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. Okay, you’re in the right spot if you’re in a start-up, you’re in a business that’s got a new product you’re looking to launch. You’ve got to hear this. This week we’ve been sharing with you some of the top services that we deliver for startups, starts from the non-disclosure agreements, patent search opinions, and our provisional and non-provisional patent applications.
Today, we’re talking about the fun stuff, how you can make money once you get those patents granted. We did a whole series about monetization a couple of weeks back, so I’m not going to be able to get into as much detail, but in this session, I’m gonna remind you to take a look at Bold Ideas: The Inventor’s Guide, depends. This book is available for free download on our website at boldpatents.com. And what I want you to do is go to chapter 18, okay, one-eight, 18 is gonna talk about patent monetization, the fun stuff, right? This is where you get to make money.
So there are three major ways, like I said, please check out the earlier videos if you can. I’m gonna talk about the big three right now: licensing, selling, and enforcing. Those are the big three. So licensing, in a nutshell, it’s for you, the inventor. Once you’ve got the license, which you get the patent granted, you have the ability to prevent anyone else from making, using, or selling your invention in the United States. You can license out the ability to do either one of those in either an exclusive or a non-exclusive manner.
For example, you could give a manufacturer the ability to make your invention and be the only one in the U.S. that can import products into the U.S., and ship them and make a profit, right? Then you could have someone else, a different entity, be the only one allowed to be the seller, right? To be the one they can actually have a retail store that can sell your product. Of course, you can make it non-exclusive and change the grant terms and have different royalty bases on gross privileges. There’s lots of different options, and there’s so much to talk about with licensing.
The second major way is through selling. Sale, little keeps it very clean. You get to move your ownership of that product, much like you would your ownership in a home or property, a physical real estate. You transfer the title, the ownership, and you assign it to a third party. Usually, what comes with that is a license back. As the inventor, you’re able to still tinker with and improve your own invention, but all rights to make, use, sell, and import that invention go to that third party. There’s lots of different little nuances about how that cash gets outlaid and how you might be able to retain either royalty or a partition payment over a specific number of time.
The third way to monetize is through enforcement. Yes, that sounds a little ugly, but there’s no better way to have that limited monopoly of 20 years. But you’ve got to flex your muscle. You’ve got to be willing to take people to court, at least threaten it, right, to get them to stop making, using, or selling your invention. It’s your job, not the Patent Office, to act as the police, to make sure that no one else is infringing your patent. So hiring a patent attorney to monitor the market, help you draft a cease-and-desist letter, to put your money where your mouth is, to make sure you tell them no way, you’re not allowed to make that without my permission.
So without further ado, I want to wrap this up, but before I go, I want to let you know that you can go to our website and get a lot more information. Again, get ahold of our book at Bold Ideas. Our website is boldIP.com. You can always give us a call.