Welcome to our course on protecting business innovations via patents. In today's session, we're going to talk about what is a patent? What do we mean by patents? Well first, patents are the strongest form of intellectual property protection issued by governments, much stronger than copyright, much stronger than trademark. They're also the shortest life. Trademarks can last forever. Copyrights sort of seem like they can last forever, it's really only 70 years plus the life of the author, but that's a long time. In contrast, patents last only for 20 years. So they're strong, they're powerful., but short lived. So they burn out fast, but while they're there you've got a tough monopoly to beat. They're also expensive to get. They're costly to apply for. So you're going to spend a lot of money and you're going to have a short period of protection. But while you've got that protection, this is as strong a monopoly as the government can issue. So they are tough, strong protection for a short period of time. Now patents also are a little complicated, because there's more than one type type of patent. Most of the time when people say, I got a patent, what they mean is the first type of patent, the utility patent. A patent which is by its definition useful. There's another kind of patent called the utility model patent. Now the names are a little similar, but they're very, very different as patents. A utility patent is something which is brilliant and really, really useful. A utility model patent is a minor or sometimes called a petty patent, a small innovation. And some countries, like the United States, don't even allow utility model patents. Some countries allow them and have a lot of them, like China or Germany. But utility patent model is not universal, utility patents are. Virtually every country has utility patents. Design patents are also fairly common, but they're a lot like copyright or a trademark, they protect design. But unlike copyright, they're protected for a manufactured good. So you could think of a design patent as like a copyright for a car or for some kind of manufactured product, so in Apple's case for a smart phone. And you might be able to sue for your design patent, which is the appearance of your product, it's not the function, not the usefulness, it's the way it looks. And you can get a copyright on a design of a artistic object, but if it's manufactured, you can't. Then you have to get a design patent, which is kind of like copyright, but for manufactured goods. And then finally, the fourth kind of patent is a plant patent. I won't talk about plant patents, because they're rare. There's not very many of them, but they are a type of patent. So I won't spend much time on it, just know they do exist. And so somebody could say, I have a patent, and you might want to say what kind of patent. When we look at a fountain pen as an example, the original fountain pen invention was a pretty cool invention versus what had been invented or used before for writing. The fountain pen was really a nice, cool idea. The utility patent was how the fountain pen stores ink, how it works. If you got a utility model patent it might be something small, a petty innovation, like we got a better grip for holding the pen easier. It's not really that brilliant, but it's a minor manufacturing improvement, which isn't worthy of a full patent. But it's worth saying, yeah, it's okay, it's a small invention, we'll give a small patent for it. And then a design patent is something like the beautiful appearance of the clip of the pen. It's not at all how it works, it's just simply how it looks, but you could get a patent on that design. That's an illustration of the three main types of patents. Throughout this course, we're going to focus primarily on utility patents, for two reasons. Most patents are utility patents, so that's 90% in America of what patents issued are for is utility patents. And utility patents re useful, that's the nature of them, but it also means they make you money. So they're the most profitable, most useful, and most prevalent type of patents. Utility model patents wont be our primary area of focus for a couple of reasons. One, we don't even have them in the United States. So the country doing the most litigation over patent lawsuits, and having more patents than any other country in the world, doesn't even have utility model patents. Doesn't mean no other country matters, and it doesn't mean utility model doesn't matter, but they're much simpler, much easier and much less common. The most common places for utility model patents are China and Europe. China has the most utility model patents of any country in the world. And that makes sense, because most utility model patents relate to something small in the manufacturing process. China does a lot of manufacturing, they care about protecting process, and the utility model is cheap, fast and easy to get. So that makes sense that a China company would say, we want to differentiate a little bit of our manufacturing process. It's a small patent, it's a quick patent, and so we'll do six times more or eight times more than any other country. They're also relatively common in German speaking countries and several other countries throughout Europe. There are utility model patents in those countries, and they also do some manufacturing, and they care about minor differences in your innovativeness. They, in some countries, like Japan, are called, I believe it's a petty patent, sometimes it's called a minor patent. Sometimes it's called an innovation patent. There are many different words used, and there aren't really that many countries doing it, so it's not a lot of harmony on that. I think I've said enough now about utility model patents, we won't spend a lot more time on that. Design patent, we will spend a little more time on. We'll come back to that later in our fourth module talking about examples and other issues. Design patents do matter. But they mostly protect art or beauty or design, not function, which is what a utility model patent or utility patent and utility model protect. Plant patents are less than 1% of patents in the US. Some countries don't even have them, they're just not that important to business. And since this course is about protecting business innovations, if you care about that, go find an attorney that likes plant patents. I don't want to talk about them. So utility patents are the most important. USA, 90% of patents are utility patents, 9% are design patents, and about 1% or a little bit less are plant patents. In China, still utility patents are really important, but utility model comes to bare as a significant chunk of China patents. The government has said, we want more patents from Chinese companies. And they haven't clearly specified, we want more utility patents. If you're a Chinese executive and you're saying, hmm, I get the same credit for utility model patent, and it's 2 pages long versus 50 pages long, I think I'll turn in the 2 page report instead of the 50 page report. So there's more focus there on the shorter patents, the utility model, than in most countries. Several types of patents, utility is about novelty, useful functions. Utility model is about minor inventions. Design is about ornamental design of a manufactured item. And plant patents about new plants that cannot self replicate, kind of a specialty area. Thank you very much, we look forward to seeing you in our next module. [MUSIC]
