I haven't read the whole thread but felt you might benefit from another inventor's point of view.
1) A lot of folks come up with great ideas.
You need to really search hard to make sure no one has invented this before and be prepared to be challenged by the USPTO for your invention claims. They will send back a list of inventions asking how is A different from B...
2) A patent attorney is important here.
They can write up the application in a way to prevent other from circumventing your idea with slight modifications that are basically a new invention. Patent disclosures are several pages of description with figures and some claims. It is the claims that really define the invention and are often used in a patent court case to prove infringement.
3) Inventions are never complex ideas.
They are very simple ideas. Things like a computer have numerous small patents that are the bulk of the design. Some patents protect the product from copycats and some are truly novel making the product highly desireable.
4) Companies and Universities do have the means to file patents on your behalf in exchange for you handing over the rights to it.
At the BIG company where I worked they would hand out $1500 awards to inventions that were accepted for patenting. They did all the leg work which amounted to filing it, defending it when it got rejected (a common scenario), amended to address the patent office concerns... roughly $50,000 on average per patent.
5) Patents are first to file not first to invent (used to be first to invent).
IF you tell someone enough about your patent for them to figure out the rest and then they file it before you THEN they win and you'll be hard pressed to prove otherwise.
One famous case, was when two programmers came up with the idea of file sharing over the telephone, started a company, hired an expert in Series-I minicomputers and brainstormed a lot but never got it to work so they disbanded the company. A couple of years later the "expert" they had hired filed several patents related to their work and with the help of a major patent troll began sueing other companies for patent infringement. These were any company who did file sharing such as Carbonite, podcasters, mp3 music and the list goes on...
Carbonite stopped them when it was discovered that one of the original inventors was mentioned in the notes filed with the patent request in the form of John's suggestion... The court ruled that John was a co-inventor and that since he wasn't listed then the patent was invalid. Carbonite won the case but many other comapnies before them paid millions to settle.
(see the When Patents Attack podcast references below in #8)
6) Patent ideas don't have to a working implementation before they can be filed.
Patents do have to be novel (not invented before), usefulness (it has some use), non-obvious (ie an expert in field would not know how to implement it).
A
patent (
/ˈpætənt/ or
/ˈpeɪtənt/) is a set of
exclusive rights granted by a
sovereign state to an inventor or assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for detailed public disclosure of an
invention. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem and is a product or a process.
[1]:17 Patents are a form of
intellectual property.
The procedure for granting patents, requirements placed on the patentee, and the extent of the exclusive rights vary widely between countries according to national laws and international agreements. Typically, however, a granted patent application must include one or more
claims that define the invention. A patent may include many claims, each of which defines a specific property right. These claims must meet relevant
patentability requirements, such as
novelty,
usefulness, and
non-obviousness. The exclusive right granted to a patentee in most countries is the right to prevent others, or at least to try to prevent others, from commercially making, using, selling, importing, or distributing a patented invention without permission.
[2][3]
from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
7) If you publish something about it, you could compromise your right to patent it.
When a new patent idea came before our review committee, we would do searches online to see if it was invented before. In some cases, we'd get an immediate hit and then ask the inventor how is your invention different from this one. Or we'd find that the inventor was obvious as an example the inventor glued a compass to his radio (any kid could do that). Sometimes the invention was unique to one industry but common to another.
An inventor once came to us with an idea of a calorie collecting device. It looked like a PDA with a specialized stylus. He did a lot of work designing the invention from a need to manage his diet. He described all the menus and how you'd stick the stylus in your food and it would record the calories in it. There was nothing like it in our searches. We then asked how does the stylus work and he said he was hoping we'd help him with that part of the design.
We explained that that was his invention not all the other stuff (things an expert in PDA software/hardware development could have easily developed). The stylus was the invention and without a working idea on how to make it function the invention was useless. I suggested a using a bar code scanning stylus where restaurant menus would have bar codes and online databases describing the caloric content of any meal. Once again, an expert in the field could easily have designed it even though at the time there was no bar codes on menus, there were barcodes in use in other industries for inventory control and retail sales which meant the new invention was useful but not novel.
8) Some interesting talks/videos on patents:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/496/when-patents-attack-part-two
http://ip.education/patent-myths/?g...HN-dywsTWDIfq4JNst_WyerWNWoNsHAYaAlyeEALw_wcB
Hyconn update:
http://gazettereview.com/2016/10/hyconn-update-happened-shark-tank/
9) Patents are filed for a variety of reasons:
- the great new idea, we are
teaching the world a new way to do things.
- steal the idea from an inventor:
- protect a proprietary company product: by patenting unique features preventing another company from doing the same feature
- prevent an idea from becoming real (at least for 20 years), one company buys another, inventor hates the notion of super-duper infomercials so invents the idea to prevent from happening
10) Some interesting patent cases:
- invention of the computer: Mauchly / Eckhardt vs Atanazov (see patent dispute in the wikipedia article where Mauchly got the idea from Atanazov's design)
- invention of the laser: the paper on Lasers by Townes and Shadlow -vs- the notebooks of Gordon Gould -vs- the invention by Thomas Maiman
- Greg Chavez, a firefighter on American Inventor TV show, invents the Christmas Angel:
but there's some controversy afterwards:
Controversy[edit]
The makers of the program were accused of modeling
American Inventor on a similar program called
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Million_Dollar_Idea&action=edit&redlink=1.
[5]
The validity of the claim that the Guardian Angel was invented by Greg Chavez is unclear. This same "invention" was actually a gag product on
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on December 16, 1993, the first night
Julia Roberts was a guest on the show. Leno used a lighter to trigger a smoke alarm within a Christmas tree which then caused the star on the top of the tree to spray a strong burst of water, putting out any potential fire. Several similar patents have been granted over the years, and Season 1 judge Doug Hall has also called it unoriginal, writing in his blog that he once worked on something similar for a client.
from wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Inventor
- modern stories:
