What is a patent?
A US patent gives the owner the right to exclude others from making, using or selling products under its scope in the United States for a period of 20 years. It's referred to as a legal monopoly.

Requirements
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or USPTO) says that in order to get a patent the inventive matter must be unique. It cannot be something that is known or anticipated by those experienced in the trade (the field of your invention).

Patentable inventions must also be useful. For example, a square tire would not be considered useful. (Unless of course you wanted to use it to permanently park a vehicle...ha!) 

Last, an invention must be novel. If your invention was known in any other part of the world at any time before you discovered or created it, you patent it.

Utility and design patents
There are the two common types of patents. Almost always the stronger type is a utility patent. Design patents only refer to the ornamental appearance. Utility patents can refer to a product, apparatus, process, system, machinery and much more. That is where your focus should be. Don't waste a lot of time on design patents that are easy to design around.

Who can file?
According to the US Patent Office only the original inventor may file a patent application and receive a valid patent. Anyone who files a patent application on subject matter that someone else had shown him, is committing fraud.

Writing, filing patent applications
Experienced inventors write their own patent applications. You should too. The two types of applications, provisional and permanent, use the same format except a provisional does not have claims. The claims an attorney must write for you.

Once written, the application should be reviewed and edited by your attorney. If you are on a tight budget, most agree it's probably best to file the provisional yourself rather than do nothing at all.

 

Patenting software:
You can save hundreds, even thousands of dollars with our patent searching and patent writing software. Patent Hunter and Patent Wizard are the only ones we sell. There's good reason for it. They're the best!

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We are pleased to see you visit our website. We hope you find the information on these web pages valuable to your innovative efforts.

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