What are the steps to take to patent your invention?
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What are the steps to take to patent your invention? Video Transcript
First, you do not need a prototype. You need to have fully thought through all the details. If you want to do a search, you can do that. The very first thing is you need to either talk with an attorney or think about these questions yourself. What is the closest thing that existed before your invention was made? What is your invention exactly, distilled to the basic concept of what is new about your technology? Third, what are the variations of the invention that you might do in the future or a company might do in the future? Fourth, what the variations of your invention that a competitor to you might do? Fifth, was it disclosed to others? Was there any co-inventorship? Who else contributed to at least one inventive concept? All those individuals need to be included in the disclosure to the Patent Office. You need to make sure you still have the legal rights to. Hopefully it was not published more than a year ago, or offered for sale prior to your filing. Which countries do you want to file in? You should also decide which countries you want to protect your invention in. You certainly should protect in your home country. Many countries require an application to be first filed in their home country. If you invented it in the United States, you need to first file it in the United States. You have one year to then select which of the other countries you might want to protect the invention in. You may choose to do a prior art search. You do not have to, but you could to make sure you are picking your battles well. Sometimes even I have really interesting ideas. I think they are great just on the side with my hobbies around baseball cards or whatever. It turns out I do a search and I find something that is similar. It's alright, you just keep moving forward. You keep thinking of things that are better. Sometimes doing a search as an independent inventor when you are using your own money to think about and file an idea is a good idea, but it is not required. Sometimes you do not want to do it because if you do do it, then you do create a duty on yourself to disclose everything that you have found and you may interpret the prior art wrong. The steps to basically take a patent are, you do not need a prototype but you may consider doing a search. You need to review the results of the search to determine if you still have something that is new and potentially patentable. You then need to prepare and file patent application in your home country using an attorney or yourself using a tool like Patent Express. .