Why does one need drawings for a patent?
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Why does one need drawings for a patent? Video Transcript
In this section, we are going to be creating and helping you decide on what is the best way to write about your figures and drawings. Figures and drawings are basically things that illustrate to an examiner, or ideally in the future to a federal jury, if your patent gets litigated, what is the environment that your invention operates in and what are all its essential features. Everything that made it into your primary elements, secondary elements, and possibly the substitute elements, should be shown in at least one figure. The figure is to tell a story of your invention, so that someone could look at your figures and understand what is going on in your invention. Oftentimes people have zoom up views. They start with an overview picture and then a later figure zooms in to specific examples. There might be some process flows that follow or use your interface for the flows that follow. There might be tables and charts. There might be all different things that help someone understand how your invention operates. There might be graphical process flows you might consider making which show graphically how your invention works. There are lots of requirements in terms of margins and the kind of formal figures you have to create so that the Patent Office accepts them. They do not want to see chicken scratch, rough drawings. But you can start with those and you could scan them in here to Patent Express and upload them to the site and you can also then indicate the view that these figures are made. If it is a mechanical invention, maybe you have interior view, a side view, a cut away view. If it is an electrical invention it could be a block diagram, it could be a circuit diagram or circuit view. So you have to just characterize broadly what that figure is showing and what is the particular view of that figure or what is it displaying to a potential viewer of that image. The other thing is you need to describe your figure. You need to describe everything that is shown in your figure; by putting at least a brief description here, later on you just need to number everything on your figure and everything you number, you will need to define. So, anything that in your primary elements, secondary elements, or substitute elements should be shown in the figure with numbers and you should describe that in the next section so that that will make it into your detailed description. It is very important here, I must stress to you, that everything that is essential to your invention is in your primary elements, your secondary elements, in your options, and even maybe a separate figure for things that could be substituted perhaps, all make it into at least one figure, so that people can see visually what your invention is doing.