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Applying for a patent is very difficult and requires a great deal of work. Since there is a significant amount of legal work involved to provide the protection an inventor wants for their patent, it is always advisable to hire a reputable patent attorney, especially if the inventor is not experienced in patenting inventions. An inventor should also keep in mind that an invention cannot be publicly disclosed or in use for over a year before even considering applying for a patent.
If an inventor files his or her own patent application, the first step involves organizing the invention's information. The name of every inventor involved must be included. There are also two forms of reduction to practice that must be presented, "actual" reduction to practice and "construction" reduction to practice. Actual reduction to practice is actually having a physical invention already constructed. This also applies to a physical prototype that is currently being tested to see if it performs the tasks and produces results described in the inventor's notebook. This invention may be capable of being improved during this process and it should produce at least some successful results. Construction reduction to practice is disclosing the invention in its entirety. This is treated in the same fashion as actual reduction to practice. An abstract, a description of the invention (including its name, functions, operation procedures, and the positive and negative aspects of the invention), and detailed drawings of the invention labeled with brief descriptions should also be included, along with any claims to the invention. All of these basic supplements should be filed along with the patent application.
When applying for a patent where more than one person is involved in inventing the product, an inventor may make sure that they and the others have signed a legal agreement so that each of them get an equal portion of the patent. Otherwise, each individual inventor may possess total independent ownership of the patent, and he or she may have the right to get the product licensed, regardless of the amount of claims made by each individual inventor.
The most negative aspect of filing for patents is the extensive length of time before results of the application are actually seen. It may take up to 18 months for the USPTO to receive and being reviewing an inventor's patent application. It may take twice as long for the USPTO to award the patent grant to the inventor or to inform the inventor that the patent was denied. While the wait for a patent is continuing, an inventor may apply "patent pending" to the invention being reviewed by the USPTO. Patents are also very expensive, and an inventor may want to use a provisional patent for marketing an invention and to invest in purchasing a utility patent application before the provisional patent expires.
A provisional patent allows an inventor to use the "patent pending" term for one year before actually applying for one of the three types of patents mentioned in Chapter 2. Once this year is over, however, the inventor must have filed a patent application before the provisional patent application has expired. If the provisional patent expires and the inventor has not filed for a utility patent after one year, the product is no longer patentable. Many inventors choose the provisional patent option because the cost is much lower, the invention's details are not reviewed, and it can buy time to protect your invention before actually applying for a patent. The "patent pending" can even appear as if the invention is in the process of receiving a utility patent and companies may be attracted into licensing the product. This can lead to marketing of a product, but as it reaches the end of the provisional period, an inventor should be arranging to apply for a utility patent. This will be necessary for full protection of the product in the open market. The negative aspect of this is the limited amount of protection an invention receives. Since the details of the invention are not reviewed, arguments on specific aspects of an invention may be hard to distinguish, and the protection an invention would normally receive with a utility patent would not help cover the invention using a provisional patent.
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patentdatabase.com www.stevens.edu/ecalendar
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