Patent Attorney and Founder
You’ve seen one of these before yeah that’s what phone’s used to look like and did you know that on February 14 1876 Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent on this an apparatus that could transmit speech electronically beating out his rival Elisha gray by just two hours never mind that Gray’s design worked better timing was all that mattered when gray later filed a lawsuit the courts awarded the patent to Belle who went down of course in history as the official inventor of the telephone
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hey everyone I’m JD Hoover USPTO patent attorney and CEO and Managing Partner here at bold patents law firm today I want to talk with you about a couple of simple steps that you should take to protect your idea so instead of going through all the nitty gritty detailed steps in this video today if you want to learn it all I wrote a 7,000 word blog article that covers this linked down below I want to talk about the primary points today that you need to know to ensure your idea is protected on September 16 2011 the American Invents Act was signed by Barack Obama it switched the u.s. inventor ship from first to invent to first to file system the patent applications filed on or after the 16th of March 2013 this forever changed the landscapes for inventors and businesses so the question is how do you file first what steps go into filing a patent application first off you need to have an invention and it needs to be patentable if you’re unsure make sure to look at some of my previous videos or articles where I dive into what makes invention patentable and how to invent an idea in 10 easy steps the next step would be to do a worldwide patentability search in fact I’ve written a blog article about it linked below so if you have an idea the key thing to think about here is making sure you don’t lose your rights in the United States there’s a one-year grace period from when you must file an invention if you’ve disclose your invention or sold it or even offer it up for sale you only have a year before your rights are completely gone I hear this story often I unfortunately have to break the bad news that if someone has launched a Kickstarter campaign and they’ve put down all their content on the website about their invention and more than a year has gone by unfortunately we can’t file a patent application for it so don’t make that mistake be sure you’re not gonna be victim of this statutory bar the second thing to think about here is inventor ship as an inventor you got to make sure that you own this invention that sounds silly but many inventors are actually employed right their full-time job during the day and they’re working on their dream or building their invention at night if those two are close meaning if your job is related to your vention you’ve got to take a careful look at your employment agreement to make sure that your employer actually won’t own this invention you don’t want to get all the way down the road and start building your dream business if your companies can put a make a mistake and ownership in it without your knowing so inventor ship making sure you avoid statutory bars the last thing to think about is eligibility right is your invention something that even fits into the patent realm or you’ve got this idea but it’s still kind of rough you want to know whether you could even seek patent protection for it once it’s brought to fruition if it’s about a natural phenomenon or an algorithm or if it’s merely about you know a natural substance or content that is already existent meaning is part of the natural language or it’s part of the society or the market that’s around us it’s likely not going to be patent eligible if you got to go to show that there’s an inventive step something truly novel about your invention above and beyond what’s already been done before you’ve got to get an opinion from a patent attorney in order to say whether your invention is eligible or not but based on what I just said you should be able to tell whether your invention is you know part of something that’s gravity or part of nature or it’s an abstract of something that’s already been done before that would probably lead you to believe that hey look you’re not gonna take a patent on it but you can surely have success in the market but get that opinion first so you’ve got to make sure with your idea that you sit down and talk with an attorney about eligibility once you’re through these sort of initial barriers and you cleared them all the question now becomes is it patentable you know could you get a patent on it even if it were to be eligible and so you have to conduct a detailed patent search a patentability search consists of two main aspects one is patent documents okay and non patent literature when it comes to patent documents those are patents that have been filed for and published that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re talking granted patents here and what’s interesting with the American Invents Act I talked about earlier that Act means that no longers are just the United States patents that you need to consider but it’s the entire world right China Canada Australia Korea I mean you name all the big hee players Europe surely all those publications will act to potentially prevents you from getting a patent here in the US if they’ve ever been published before the examiner’s job is to make sure that if they award an invention a patent that it’s truly the first of its kind in the world so before you spend tons of time energy and money preparing and filing for a patent application you’re going to want to spend the time upfront doing the diligence of connecting a patent search and allow us to do a professional search for you on these patent documents now this other aspect of non patent literature this works very much the same as if you’re gonna try to start a brand or a trademark and conduct your own natural language search in the same way do a natural language search on your own invention to see if there’s anyone out there in the market that is doing or performing the same type of functionality you don’t want to be able to go through and hire an attorney and pay an application fee and get a year or two down the road if it’s already been done before and not only are you not going to get a patent on it but you might even be found to be infringing on someone else’s patent so long story short patent searching is huge and its really the first part of how to bring your idea to market via patent protection so once you get through the patent search now we’re talking right now this is a novel patentable invention now it’s matter just pushing the throttle forward and launching you get to follow what’s called a patent application either a provisional or a non provisional I’ve got a separate video that we’ve go through the details of what’s the difference between a provisional and non provisional I’ll save you that right now today once you file your application your patent attorney will work with you very carefully to make sure that it’s structured in the right way that this the scope of claim meaning the written description the drawings and the claims are quite broad we want to try to get you the most amount of protection possible when that gets filed and submitted to the Patent Office now the fun begins the back-and-forth right the examiner will do their own search they’ll confirm or maybe even deny the search that was done before and they’ll come back with their own potential regret rejections or objections and it’s our job as your patent attorney to argue on your behalf to come back with amendments or legal argument to overcome those those are called patent office actions and one or two are generally expected but it could take three or four to milk to get your patent all the way through to grant it once your patent rights are granted that is when you have the ability to prevent anyone else from making using selling or importing that specific granted right into United staes now we’ve also got a separate article I get into about international patent protection that again I won’t get into in this video but taking your idea all the way through patent search application office actions to patent granted is no small task as you can understand after this of course there’s the monetization right show me the money and we have plenty of videos explaining how to make money with patents I want to give you a brief highlight here today you can seek to enforce your patent rights meanings start building making and selling your invention and preventing anyone else from doing the same that’s the classic way of enforcing your rights you can also make quite a good amount of money licensing your rights meaning allowing another entity or two or several to make sell or import your invention on your behalf or using a royalty payment where they give you payments for every single one that they sell of course there’s a third option about outright selling your invention to someone to have full ownership and rights over enforcing it on their own so hope this has been a great journey I’m sure you’ve got an idea out there I’m curious to hear what it is if you do get a chance please put it in the comments below any questions you’ve got I want to go to get back with you and share with you any of those open-ended questions anything that’s still in your mind I appreciate your time here today I’m JD Hoover patent attorney and CEO here at bold patents law firm have a great day everybody go big go bull
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