Easy Patent Guide

Sometimes Patent and Trademark are used interchangeably. And find it difficult to tell the difference between the two.

Patent confers a right to the inventor to “exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. A trademark, on the other hand, is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark.

The Patent services determine the invention’s patentability. This is done by carefully reviewing the invention. The examination process of Patent Services usually lasts for 12 to 18 months. The Patent services will not tell you if your invention has already been invented by someone else unless you apply for a patent. The Patent services examiners only verify that the description and claims per description by their inventors are new, unique, and not obvious to the Patent services. Patent Services could not make confirmation with regards to the usefulness or profitability of the invention.

Patent management is important especially among corporations because it can build shareholder value if done effectively. Profit margins are increasingly under pressure in today’s global economy. It is therefore important for shareholders and top management to realize that patent managements can bring additional revenues to companies. They will increasingly expect IP rights, in particular patent rights, to be managed as a business, turning, where possible, a traditionally expensive patent operation into a source of profits.

In patent investigations the major challenge for most IP workers is to know where and how to retrieve up-to-date, high-quality patent as well as patent-related information. Well, for simple searches regarding a known patent number, inventor, assignee, head title, etc. there are already a couple of easy-to-use Internet sources provided by national and international patent authorities. For instance esp@cenet (EPODOC), DEPATISnet and the USPTO databases. These are good places to start the patent investigations of inventions.

In order to patent inventions one needs to adhere to certain patent inventions requirements. Among the requirements in Patent inventions are the following:

Conditions for Obtaining a Patent

1. Non-Obviousness - meaning that the technology must be different enough from the prior art so as to not be obvious in view of the prior art.

2. Novelty - meaning that the technology is not “anticipated” or identical to an invention disclosed in a single piece of prior art.

The word “infringement” means an encroachment upon the domain of a patentee that is described by the claims of her/his patent. If a patent is compared to a real property, the claims are similar to the boundary recited in the deed. If one commits invasion to the boundary of a landowner’s real estate, he is said to trespass. An invasion of a patentee’s claims, on the other hand, is called infringement. Both are civil wrongs or “torts.” Unlike a trespass, patent infringement is a statutory wrong and is governed by federal law. US Law defines patent infringement as “whoever without authority makes, uses, or sells any patented invention, within the United States during the term of the patent therefore, infringes the patent.”

Patent drawing is a requirement by law for patent applications in order to understand the nature of the invention. The Commissioner may require patent drawing where the nature of the subject matter admits of it; these patent drawing must be filed with the application. This includes practically all inventions except compositions of matter or processes, but patent drawing may also be useful in the case of many processes.