As an inventor or business owner, you need to be vigilant in protecting your invention from theft. While you may have a patent on your product, it doesn’t mean that no one will ever rip it off. To stay ahead of the game, protect your intellectual property with these tips.
1. Patents are not enough to protect your business from knockoffs and counterfeiters
If you’ve worked hard to create a product or service, you want to be able to profit from it. But how can you do that if your intellectual property is counterfeited, or copied without your knowledge or consent? You can use patents to protect your business and your intellectual property, but you need to be aware of the limitations of patents.
When you file a patent for your invention, you're promising that your work is unique, relevant, and new. Patents give other parties from the business or the public exclusive use of your invention for up to 14 years. This means that people and companies other than you, such as competitors, have a huge and potentially profitable advantage over you.
Patents don’t cover your other business activities or reasonable extensions of your original invention. For example, you can cover other products or services that are the same or similar to your original product, or others who make similar or compatible products or services.
Patents do not prevent strangers from copying your ideas. And patents can be breached – so long as you keep your promise to give them exclusive use. So if someone breaks your promise to license your invention, you can decide to stop using the patent and pay for damages. If you file a patent infringement lawsuit, it will be more difficult for the person or company who is infringing to prove their innocence, because it will be harder to establish the basically hearsay nature of the other parties' use of your invention.
It’s important to do your best to protect your intellectual property from copyright and patent infringement. Here are a few types of infringement that can hurt you:
Teasing the Concept: You invented something that could potentially be a commercially viable product. If someone else steals your idea before you market it, you’re not out of luck. If that person or company later markets the product, it might limit their market and profits.
Copying the Concept: Another way to hoard the market is to copy (almost) the entirety of your original idea.
2. Trademarks protect brand recognition and customer loyalty
A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, design, sound, or even a smell that identifies a product or service. Trademarks protect brand recognition and customer loyalty, as well as establish a company’s reputation and image. When you create a trademark, you’re also responsible for enforcing it.Patents are difficult to patent in certain categories. Patent applications must be filed by government agencies like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and abroad. And, many patents haven’t been granted yet. Manufacturers and companies are responsible for registering their inventions and may need to add their own identifiers.
Before the patent office creates a searchable database of patents, companies may file patents on something like an unfinished machine or an idea for a new recipe. These patents exist in the mind, and companies have to wait for the patent office to grant the patent before they can implement it.
Trademark protection is useful for keeping unauthorized additions to your product lines away from the public, but it also bolsters brand protection by showing off your authority and quality. A good example for this is a heavy metal band like Black Sabbath, whose name is protected under various trade dress applications. The band can file for a trademark so that consumers know “the band” is associated with a particular kind of music, not just a particular brand.
Robert Morris University professor Debbie David, Ph.D. explains a company’s choice to file for a patent is based on three factors:
When deciding whether to go ahead with a patent or not, it’s important to consider whether the patent would prevent a broader use of the technological benefits without paying royalty fees or licensing fees — this is called an interested party doctrine.
Another option for protecting your invention from theft is through trademarks. Within ten years of a product being created, you can register the trademark if you and the owner of the trademark want to do it together.
3. How to find a patent attorney or trademark lawyer
If you’re looking for a great patent attorney or trademark lawyer, there are a few things you should do first. First, ask friends and family for recommendations. If you don’t know anyone who can recommend a great attorney, then ask your colleagues or friends for a referral.Next, visit the website of the chief US patent attorney for the jurisdiction where you live or the chief US trademark office. Do a quick Google search on the name of the attorney or trademark office.
Finally, take advantage of job searching sites like Indeed or LinkedIn. While they don’t guarantee that they can find you a great job, they can point you in the right direction. LinkedIn also has a feature called the US Secrets search function that will turn up pending patents from government filings. When you use the True Patent Corporation trademark search feature, you’ll likely find that your invention is covered by an active patent.
If you have a good business idea and your idea is technologically complex, patentability may not be a concern. In the US, if an invention is novel, does not exist in a prior art form, and has an important use case, it should be patent-eligible. The Federal Circuit is the appellate court that reviews applications for patents.
Before you patent an invention, determine whether you have the resources to successfully defend the patent. Essentially, if the attorney you hire to defend your patent charges a high fee, is discriminatory, or the other party files a counterclaim, the patent will almost certainly be invalid.
Work with public domain organizations or non-profit institutions to protect your invention. These organizations will preserve the public’s right to use inventions. Organizations like the Copyright Alliance and the Public Patent Legal Foundation are great sources for protecting inventions.
Absorb some of the risk by contracting with an inventor or enter into a license agreement before you issue the patent or pursue patent litigation. Patents can be extraordinarily costly.
4. How to choose an appropriate patent or trademark attorney for your needs
Anyone can call them self a patent lawyer, so you need to do your homework before hiring one. The best way to find a good patent attorney is to use referrals from people you trust.What does the term patent mean? Patents protect inventions and create national ecosystems where others can reuse and develop inventions freely. Before a patent is issued, patents must be sufficiently innovative to make the existence of the technology plausible.
A civilization can only rise so high without having the newest tech outlawed or copied for cheap.
Patents are essential to protect your invention. Because US Patent Office (USPTO) only receives applications for what they consider to be inventive or valuable, it makes your job of protecting and selling your invention more difficult.
However, it is possible to secure a patent on a technology that has already become widely widely usable. The USPTO will approve your patent as soon as there is evidence that it was not only innovative but also useful, the Basic Requirements of Patents website explains.
While patents might prevent people from trying to bring a new idea to market, they don’t guarantee it. Couple this with the fact that not all patents are granted, only a fraction are published, and you can expect to face skepticism from both parties. For that reason, it’s important to protect your invention with the best defense an inventor could ask for.
Patent attorney Jim Irsaykowski stresses the importance of a patent application that clearly explains the idea and how the invention works. The patent application must show that the invention can solve a problem and solve a problem uniquely.
Patents can be costly. The price of a patent could increase if there is a positive evaluation for your application. The USPTO only approves patent applications that are no more than $ 1 million and no part of which has already been patented before.
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