As the founder of a think tank which happens to operate online, I often hear horror stories of small time innovators and inventors having their ideas, patents, and new concepts ripped off. We all know that trying to hold onto intellectual capital these days is getting tougher and tougher. If you come up with a new invention, by the time you patent it, someone else has already stolen the idea, copied it, and is in full scale production shipping it into the markets that you were intending to sell to. Okay so, let's talk about this for second shall we?
Some good advice might be to get a provisional concept patent or least file for one for your new invention, as you are building your prototype. And yet, as soon as you do that you've given away at least part of your idea to someone else. They might have other components or knowledge about other fields to couple to this idea of yours, which will allow them to create a prototype faster, and perhaps even better than the one you are building. This is where it is quite important to have a solid and experienced patent attorney.
It is hard to estimate every potential eventuality that can happen prior to filing a patent, or which way the technology will end up. You just can't know that. Previously in business, I was always amazed at the new ideas our franchisees would come up with in the marketplace, and how our customers would find new ways to use our technology, or the services we provided them. They would often ask us to perform some adjunct service, or modify our equipment to solve some of their other needs. Being as it was we were in the business to make money and give good customer service, we generally would oblige if we could make additional revenues doing so.
This is where a good patent attorney comes in because they know how to make a patent stick, but make it ambiguous enough to cover the widest possible area so that others don't infringe on your possible uses or future modifications of your device, invention, or new concept. A poorly written patent will get you into all sorts of problems, and cause incessant lawsuits and challenges as well. After all, if someone wants to compete with you using your technology, that company will have their own patent attorney try to find holes to break into your patent, and ensure that if there is a lawsuit, that they will either win it, or prevent you from stopping them.
Without a good patent attorney, all bets are off and without money to defend a poorly written patent you can understand that you either pay now, or pay later. And if you end up paying later after going with a cheap patent attorney solely based on price, it could end up costing you 10 times if not hundreds of times as much to prevent infringement. Who knows, if you get into a real war with a larger corporation, the amount of money you might lose could be a thousand-fold. You just can't know that. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment