Inventors, Patent Law, and Legal Watchdogs

Your wife, children, friends, and neighbors all appear strangely silent and unmoved by your claims that the EHG generator you've created produces hydrogen at the cost of $ 0.0038 per cubic meter - that is, three times lower than the cost to produce the same volume of natural gas - but despite their intellectual lethargy, you can barely contain your own feverish excitement.


A patent is defined as the exclusive right granted by a government to an inventor to manufacture, use, or sell a physical invention for a set number of years.

A patent attorney will definitely understand what you're talking about. Patent attorneys can be visionary as well, in their shrewd ability to explain to those bureaucratic stiffs at the United States Patent and Trademark Office exactly what's going down. A patent attorney with a marvelous mind will see your invention for what it truly is: the ultimate Al Gore green dream. You're on the verge of creating a car that will run on water. No environmentally hip automobile owner will ever need to pump gas in their tank again.

What Is It?

A patent is defined as the exclusive right granted by a government to an inventor to manufacture, use, or sell a physical invention for a set number of years.

A top-tier patent attorney is a combination technician, engineer, artist, and writer. He or she will shift between right-brain intuition, and pure left-brain analysis, like gears in an Audi R10 at LeMans. Savvy patent lawyers possess all the scientific skills and legal knowledge to ferret out all the myriad ramifications of your novel invention. What's more they communicate all this in breathtakingly lucid ways that a government patent examiner will instantly grasp.

Who Needs One?

Inventors need patent attorneys to protect their priceless creations. On the flip side, large manufacturing companies need patent attorneys, too, to protect themselves when a case of patent infringement might shut them down.

Benefits

Your patent attorney will ensure your patent is precisely articulated to give you the broadest and most all-inclusive protection, while at the same time, not being so generally defined as to be rejected by patent examiners as too sweeping. He or she will demonstrate what distinguishes your invention from "prior art" within the category, and build persuasive arguments to express exactly how your invention represents a novel application of ideas.

Keep in mind that many initial applications are rejected despite their strengths. Patent examiners are a cautious bunch. Your patent attorney will use rejection as a building block to clarify what the examiner is looking for, and re-write the application to suit the U.S.P.T.O.'s needs.

Once approved, your patent attorney will be able to easily identify any infringement cases. Infringement occurs when your patented product, not involved in the development process of another manufacturer's product, winds up being a major (or minor) element in the manufacturer's own final product.

One famous example of this legal transgression would be R.I.M., maker of the peripatetic BlackBerry smart phone, getting socked with a lawsuit for infringing on patents owned by a little-known U.S. company. Even though the patents were still being re-examined by the U.S.P.T.O. for their validity, R.I.M. quickly settled for a cool $600 million with the patent owner. If R.I.M. were to ultimately lose in court, they would have lost all rights to use the patented technology, and the entire BlackBerry network would have been shut down. In comparison, $600 million looked cheap.

Because damages and injunctions for patent infringement can derail a commercial item in the marketplace, big multi-national companies are employing stellar patent attorneys, too, in an effort to challenge claims of infringement filed against them. In fact, right now in the corridors of power in the U.S. Congress, these legal eagles are hoping to reform patent law by capping damages or royalty payments according to the patent's "specific contribution" in the over-all design of the product.

In other words, patent attorneys serving big business want to reduce the risk of inadvertent infringement, and make owners of marginally related patents less likely to justify the recovery of staggering financial rewards for damages.

Naturally, individual inventors feel these proposed reforms favor goliath corporations and patent owners.

Risks

The volume of issued patents is increasing by leaps-and-bounds. Since1980 the number of patents issued per year by the U.S.P.T.O. has jumped from less than 62,000 to more than 165,000. The number of patent applications has also increased nearly five times, from about 100,000 to more than 500,000. Technology, biotechnology, and business method patents lead the charge.

Consequently, the process of awarding patents, doing business, and determining claims of patent infringement have all become more convoluted than ever. Litigation over patents is skyrocketing, too.

And so is the price you'll pay for a top-tier patent lawyer to figure all of this out.

The information in the article is not intended to substitute for the legal expertise and advice of your attorney. We encourage you to discuss any decisions about litigation with an appropriate legal expert.