Information on Filing a U.S. Patent

Power of the Patent in the U.S.

• With a patent, you can block others from using, manufacturing or selling in the United States a product based on your idea. The USPTO explains that this protection exclude others from infringing on your intellectual property. However, it does not represent an approval for you to manufacture or sell items containing the invention. These actions may be legitimate but only after you have established that there are no other regulatory or legal roadblocks associated with the invention.
  
  

Power of the Patent Outside of the U.S.

• The USPTO specifies that competitors may be able to duplicate and sell your invention with no legal consequences if the products are manufactured and sold outside of the U.S. unless you filed patent protection with other countries. Products, parts or sub parts that infringe your patent cannot be legally imported into the United States. Typically, inventors seek protection under the Patent Cooperation Treaty that protects rights of the inventor in more than 140 additional countries.
  
  

Filing with the USPTO

• Inventors may file directly with the USPTO, at uspto.gov, using the training material posted on the site, or hire patent attorneys to file on their behalf. The submission may take two forms. For concepts not completely developed yet, the USPTO welcomes the filing of a patent provisional. This document captures, in a lose format, the essence of the idea and who the inventors are. The provisional application gives the inventor 12 months to further validate or refine her concept in preparation for a formal submission. The filing of a full patent can follow or skip a patent provisional. This submission must comply with a formal structure.
  
  

Inventorship

• Some elements must be sorted out before the filing. For instance, the USPTO has the most stringent definition about inventors. Only the person or group of people who developed the original concept can be called inventors. This excludes colleagues who joined to build prototypes or refine the concept, an action "called reduction to practice" by USPTO.
  
  

Ownership

• Your patent represents a piece of property that can be transferred, licensed, donated or passed to descendants through the power of a will. Before you file a patent, you need to sort out who owns the intellectual property. Although you are the inventor, you may not own the intellectual property. It may belong to the organization for which you work. Employment contracts typically articulate who owns inventions created during work hours and outside the facilities. If you cannot be the owner, your organization becomes the "assignee."
  
  

Claims

• Claims represent the elements in the patent that give you a legal advantage. They capture the true novel aspects of the invention while the rest of the document paints the background and contrasts the idea to prior work from others. The USPTO reviews the claims thoroughly and investigated whether someone else wrote a similar claim in another patent. Examiners' reports present arguments one claim at a time. You can run your own due diligence prior to filing by searching the USPTO patent database using keywords relating to your idea. This allows you to rephrase the claim to avoid any perception of overlap.
  
  

Cost

• USPTO charges a filing fee that may range between $400 and $1,000 for a patent provisional. The cost for filing a patent averages $7,000. For questions about fees, the USPTO provides the following phone number: 571-272-1000.