This course assumes no prior knowledge in law, business or engineering. However, students with backgrounds in all three areas will find useful concepts or ideas in the course on how to protect business innovations using patents. The approach taken in this course is practical and commercial rather than theoretical. A combination of lectures and case studies help to illustrate the concepts and make the course more interesting. After completing this course, students should be able to understand how patents are issued and protect innovations, including: What is a patent? What do they protect? How do we get a patent? Where are patents valid? How much do they cost? In addition to basic concepts the course also deals with advanced topics such as: software patents, business process patents, patenting life, patent trolls and multiple case examples of large and small companies using patents and patent lawsuits. We also expect you to have fun in this course. So go forth and enjoy!
2.2 Step 2: Formal patent application
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来自 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 的课程
Protecting Business Innovations via Patent
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从本节课中
PROCESS OF GETTING A PATENT
This week we will look at the process of getting a patent in terms of the time, cost and effort required for each step of the patenting process. Here's where you plan your assault on the buffet.
与讲师见面
Theodore Henry King CLARKAssociate Professor
Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management Department
Welcome back to our course on Protecting Business Innovations via Patents.
Now that you've gotten your provisional patent,
we're going to talk about filing the formal patent application.
This is the second step in a four step process.
You've gotten your provisional patent in step one.
Your second step is filing the formal application.
And this is where most of the work, for you as an inventor, is going to come in.
Most of the work for your attorney is coming in step three,
navigating the patent and review appeals process.
But for you as an inventor you're going to be spending a lot of your time and
effort on getting the formal application done.
In this formal patent application there's a lot of details required.
Now it's worth keeping in mint that some patents are much longer than other
patents and have much more details than other patents.
Sometimes they're fairly short.
I've seen patents that are as short as three pages.
I've seen patents that are more than 100 pages,
sometimes several hundred pages.
So the length of patents and the details that are required can be quite different.
Many entrepreneurs maybe inclined to go for shorter, more general patent which
is easier to do, easier to understand, probably easier to get approved,
but also probably less useful once you get to court.
The more detailed and more functional in smaller patents
that a company like a Google or an Apple might file.
Might run in to hundreds pages and have enormous detail and be very very small,
very, very narrow but also very hard to get around, hard to avoid.
Hard to figure out how to make something slightly different,
that gives you another patent.
And not going to work if there's enough detail.
So a big company will probably spend a great deal of time
on this with a lot of detail.
A small entrepeneur may be more general and
quicker to go through this with less detail.
But regardless of whether you're a large company or
a small company, this is where most of your time and effort is going to go in for
your patenting processes is filing the formal patent application.
Now you might actually not spend most of your cost here.
You may spend more cost in steps three and four.
But at least this is your first barrier to getting your patent and
your first significant expense.
The provisional patent cost you almost nothing.
This one costs you a lot.
It costs much more effort and much more money.
In terms of what's required in the details, of within your application.
You do have to have a lot of information about all elements of the patent.
And the three things that are required to get a utility patent are novelty,
utility, and non-obviousness.
This is what you have to show in your application requirement.
Because of the complication particularly of the third point,
non-obviousness, this requires a lot more detail, a lot more time to go into.
And we won't go into these details here because in Module 3 of our course,
we're going to look much more carefully at novelty and utility and non-obviousness.
One at a time.
We'll spend most of our time on the third point,
non-obviousness because it's the hardest.
But this is what you have to support, provide evidence for,
provide detail for in your patent application.
So your time and effort is getting this application ready,
which you're not going to be able to amend, so
it has to be done right the first time and filed with the government.
Now, in summarizing this formal application process
we'll get into the details later of what these three elements mean.
But it just takes time, it takes time and effort.
After the provisional patent you fortunately have time,
you have one year to file your formal application.
Nothing else is a barrier of time.
You've gotten your formal application in, so
any time after publication is irrelevant now.
Once you've gotten your provisional patent in you've stopped any clock
on prior publications or novelty, you're in, you're in the patenting system.
But you've got one year to get your formal application in,
and this going to take you a lot of effort and time.
It's also going to cost you money.
You're either going to have to spend around $100,000 on a patent
attorney in getting this in and if it's a full application in a large company.
Or you're going to have to spend
a significant amount of your personal time as an entrepreneur to put this together.
And you can probably get away with the cost of around $10,000 US
in government legal fees and miscellaneous fees, patent search fees, etc.
So you can get away with lower cost if you do a lot of the work yourself, but
then you got your value what your time worth.
What's it's worth not to be working.
What's the worth to be working full time on this patent application.
That's got it's own cost.
And so there is significant cost involved, and significant time involved,
and there's a high chance also that once you get this application in,
the patent office is going to say no.
The majority of patents that are filed will be rejected.
You might get lucky.
You might get your patent accepted.
You might not have to go to steps three and four.
But for most people filing their patent application,
you will face an initial rejection.
And you will have to proceed onto the next step of negotiating and
potentially appealing the decision of the Patent Trademark Office or
Patent Examiner they may be going to court.
That's it.
Thank you.
We'll talk about step three, going to court in our next session.
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