How to Get a Good Patent
How to Get a Good Patent
How to get a good patent? It is easy to get a worthless patent, but quite hard to file a good one.
A good patent starts with a good invention. The invention should have a high value if the invention were to be licensed or sold to competitors in a marketplace. From an economic perspective, you want to know if you are making a $3 improvement to a $10 product, for example.
The economic value must be determined by comparing the invention to the best design-around alternative.
A good patent application describes the invention not just from your perspective, but from the perspective of a potential competitor. Many inventors are blinded by their unwritten assumptions, such as their initial market, their available engineering or manufacturing resources, etc. A good patent application describes *what your competitors will make or do*, not just what you might make or do.
A good patent application is written well. There are many little words and phrases that you should *never* see in a patent application. These include “invention”, “must”, “should”, “only”, “an aspect of the invention”, and many others. As merely one example, there is a case called Philips where $100M changed hands because the patent drafter said “the feature of the invention” rather than “a feature of the invention”. There are lots of other things that a competent patent agent/attorney will do when they draft the application.
A good patent application is easy to read. It should *not* have lots of complicated, thick legalese, eternally-long run-on sentences, or giant paragraphs that are mountainous blocks of incomprehensible text.
You want the examiner to understand the invention so that you get a good examination, get the right prior art cited against you, and show that you deserve a patent by overcoming the prior art. The incomprehensible language merely assures that the patent attorney will make a huge pile of money going back and forth with the examiner while you keep paying the bills.
A good patent application covers as many features and ways to envision your invention as possible. This requires another level of creative thinking beyond the invention. What happens when your manufacturing costs drop? Will it open up new uses for the inventions – or new competitors? How will competitors approach the market with their talent and resources?
There are many other questions to answer, but you get the drift.
In sum, writing a good patent application is much harder than many people realize. Sadly, many inventors throw the invention over the wall to a patent attorney who just writes down what they were told and add very little help.
How to find a good patent attorney?
BlueIron finances patents. We pay all of your patent costs – and we have “skin in the game” to ensure that your patents are well written and have serious commercial value.