Why do you apply for a patent?
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Why do you apply for a patent? Video Transcript
In this section, I am going to describe how you qualify for a patent and what qualifies for a patent. If it is an invention, if it is a new original invention that you have created, what is an invention? It is a creation of the human mind that is useful, that actually improves a method or process, a way of doing things. Or it is a physical article that solves a problem that has never been solved before or has been solved in a different way and you have come up with a new way of solving that problem through this article. So you can protect inventions of the human mind through patents if they are both new, which means novel, as the Patent Office calls it, and two, if they are not obvious which means they are not obvious in light of things that existed in the past. Obviousness is a little bit more subjective. It is an objective test to evaluate it but there is a lot of inventions that might seem obvious to you today that were not obvious at the time the invention was made. So it really is an inquiry at the time the invention was made, would one think it was obvious then. Today I can say having a mobile phone is obvious. But maybe 20 years ago or 30 years ago when the original mobile phone patent was created, it was not obvious to the whole world then. So anything that is obvious at the time the invention was made, the Patent Office can challenge whether or not that patent should be granted if it believes it is obvious in light of things that existed. And would a reasonable person with skill in the art, an ordinary person with skill in the art, look to those other references to create your invention at the time the invention was made. So to qualify for it, it needs to be both new and has to be not obvious. It also needs to fall within one of the statutory classes. It needs to be a machine or article of manufacture, it needs to be a process. It needs to be one of those statutory classes of intellectual property that is allowed to be protected by patents. There are some that are not. It is very hard for me to get a patent on a new way of making cocaine or a new way of making something that is illegal. Patents only protect things that are not primarily used for an illegal purpose. So patents protect useful new ideas that qualify if they are both new and they are not obvious and they fall within one of the statutory classes. I also cannot protect things that are illegal. I can protect things that are new kinds of genetic species of human beings, for example. There are certain things that go against a moral and ethical code that the government has set for us and those things cannot be protected by patent. But most inventions, most things that are new and that are not obvious and which do not have an illegal purpose and do not have to do with creation of new human beings or new things that are related to that are protectable as patents.