What guarantee does a patent offer?
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What guarantee does a patent offer? Video Transcript
Patents offer no guarantee. So that is the answer to this question: do patents offer a guarantee that you are going to be rich or your invention is going to sell or people are going to want to buy your product or whether your claims are going to be infringed by others? No, the answer is no. There are no guarantees. But do not let that discourage you, because out of every hundred patents that are filed, maybe one or two become valuable and may be extremely valuable at that. So patents are things that help to protect your invention. But exactly determining what are the boundaries that your claims will end up having after you file a patent application, it is hard to tell because the Patent Office will find prior art and you may have to narrow your claims. The boundaries that your claims encompass do not necessarily indicate whether or not someone is going to infringe those claims. Many ideas and patents that are generated are done well before the commercialization of a particular idea. So it is hard to always predict how expensive it is going to be to manufacture the product, whether there is an actual market that is going to purchase the product or service, and whether or not it is going to be something it is going to be economically feasible, whether the price point in which you may wish to sell it versus the manufacturing cost and the investment in the product is going to actually create a business out of that particular invention. So it is very hard to predict whether a patent is going to end up being valuable or not. So it offers no guarantees, but it offers you hope to protect your idea and make sure that you could stop others from doing it. It also gives you the recognition memorialized in history that you were the first to invent something and that gets recorded at the Patent Office. It gets published in gazettes all over the world and your great, great grandchildren will also be able to search and see your patent. So at the very least, it gives the recognition to you and potentially it also helps others come up with new ideas that build on yours. Sometimes, an idea that you have that is patented can become very valuable and you will be able to make a lot of money on that basis. But it is hard to predict often at the time a patent is filed because the time a patent is filed is probably much earlier than the point of commercialization. So that is the general answer to the question do patents offer any guarantees. The answer is no but it offers you hope.