There are 2 basic types of patents that most of us are concerned with. They are Utility patent, and Design patent. You can also have a patent for a plant or new chemical. The design patent is the easiest (and cheapest) to get. It will offer you some protection of your idea, but is very easy to design around. You can file a design patent your self if you can do the drawings. There are 2 books that can help. One is called "Patent it yourself" and the other is "How to make patent drawings: a patent it yourself companion". Both of these books have a lot of information and can be hard to understand at times. One of the things that I found interesting is that as far as the USPTO is concerned, there are 2 types of drawings. One is for a design patent and the other is for a Utility patent. They have different requirements. We used an attorney to file our patents, both design and utility. My wife did the drawings and we scanned them and sent them to the attorney. We followed the instructions in the book about how to do design patent drawings and once the attorney had them, he had us eliminate some of the lines that the book told us to make. His reasoning was that the lines showed our product as transparent. By eliminating that transparency lines, we gave our product a wider range of protection. It could be made either transparent or opaque. We used the same drawings for the utility patent. You can have both a design and utility patent on the same product like we do, although it is not necessary.
Filing for a Provisional Patent Application is relatively cheap, and will give you up to 1 year of protection. It cost $110.00 to file a PPA if you are a small entity (which you probably are), and you file it yourself. Our attorney charged us $360 to file it for us using our drawings. Once you get the filing receipt, you may start using the term "Patent Pending". This gives you time to work out the details of what exactly you want to file. Once you file your Utility patent, it will probably take at least 6 months before the USPTO even looks at it. Don't be surprised when they reject it. This seems to be standard operation procedure. They will send you notification about why they are rejecting it. You then need to address whatever it is they don't like. Of course it cost more money but not too much. It's more of a pain than anything else. The whole patent process could take 2 years or more before you are finally issued a patent.
The Utility patent will give you the most protection of your idea. It takes more effort to come up with something that doesn't violate the patent that has been issued. With that being said, don't be surprised when someone copies your idea and makes a knock off. If it's a good idea, someone will copy it. For large companies, they may copy your idea, get it out in the market and not worry about whether or not they have infringed on your idea. Their attitude is that they will make their money and hold up any lawsuit for years. By the time the law suit is finally heard, either the inventor is broke and can't fight it, or they will settle for a small percentage of what they made on your idea. It sucks, but it's reality. It's probably more important to be first to market than get to hung up on getting a patent. There are many products that are successful that don't have a patent. What they do have is a good marketing budget and supply chains with established outlets.
Trademarks are words, phrases, or even fictional characters. "Kleenex" is one, "Ronald McDonald" is another. There are several categories to file trademarks in. You couldn't register "Kleenex" in the category that "Kleenex" is in but if you wanted to use that word in a different category you might be able to. If you have a word or phrase you want to trademark, you should use the TM next to it in what is called the superscript area, which is just to the right of the last letter and slightly higher than the last letter. Once you have registered your trademark with the USPTO and they have granted it, you can then start using the R with a circle around it. This tells the world that your trademark is registered and gives you certain legal rights if someone infringes on it.
Copyright is interesting in that as soon as the written word is published, it is copyrighted. That's not the same as a registered copyright. Copyrights are cheap to register, usually around $35. A copyright also last the longest. As soon as this blog is posted, it is copyrighted. If I wanted to file for copyright protection for legal reasons, meaning that no one could reproduce this without my consent, I could. If I don't file for copyright protection and someone copied it, I could probably get them to stop publishing it, but could not recover monetary damages if they had used it to profit from.
All of these have value to companies that might be interested in your invention. They want to make sure there is protection before they invest in the marketing or selling of your product.
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