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Paul RakoTechnical Editor Paul Rako looks at analog technology in power supplies, interface, the signal path, and life in general.



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Monday, July 21, 2008

File your own patents

Jul 21 2008 9:32AM | Permalink |Comments (6) |


My IC designer buddy Don Sauer already has something like 40 patents, mostly when he worked at National Semiconductor. Now he is working up an article for me on how to do it cheap. He indicates you can get one filed for about 400 dollars and if it is accepted it might cost as much as 2000 dollars. Of course, all this is predicated on your making sure that you don’t hire a lawyer. That can easily add an order of magnitude, or two,  to the cost. Don sent a list of some of his favorite patent websites:

Wikipedia on claims
 TIFAC
Allen Wood (pdf)
WIPO
Nolo Press


Related entries in: Analog | 

Reader Comments



at 7/21/2008 4:15:21 PM, BruceAHz said:
I will grant you that a reasonably intelligent person can certainly file a patent application "pro se"; anyone who can read with comprehension can do most "knowledge work". However, the suggestion that one should file pro se begs two questions; are you ready (and interested enough) to invest the time to become knowledgeable in patent law and procedure to do it as well as an attorney or patent agent AND how are you accounting for the opportunity cost of the time spent (both the learning time, which can be amortized over many patents but which is an on-going investment as the law/rules change, and the time prosecuting the patent).

If the answer to the first question is NO, then we all know about GIGO. And if the answer to the second question is "Duh" or "I do it on my own time" then I suggest you haven't thought this through.

After being a senior R&D engineer for 25 years I decided I was interested enough in IP and now have my own company acting as a part-time, outsourced Director of Intellectual Property. Most of my clients would prefer to spend their time (and their subordinate's time) working on the invention itself and to hire someone - myself, a patent agent, or, heaven forbid, an attorney - to translate the engineering into a patent application. I would suggest this route is more cost effective for a company than to divert engineering talent to a task for which they are not trained.



at 7/21/2008 7:17:13 PM, RAJ Seela Raj said:
I agree with Bruce's comment. There are always the few who can convert the invention idea into IP, however this 'unproductive' (as some engineers put it) area of work does not apply for the majority. The engineers should continue inventing while the IP folks find ways to enhance the IP fortpolio



at 7/21/2008 11:41:14 PM, Pal Palych said:
The idea to convert existing $400 into a dream $2000 looks nice when the there is no time estimate. However, even one full busy day is not enough to generate a modest quality or better say acceptable patent draft.
So, you are all right, gentlemen:).
As a rule, it is a professional business, unless the idea is real gold for yourself. Once I have made such a case for myself and managed to get an international patent protection for a very promising and simple thing. However, I have no time for any promotion being busy, therefore, I am only paying patent fees in several countries. It is a real price, which is measured not by thousands but by ten-thousand units of bucks.



at 7/22/2008 7:53:58 AM, Howman said:
Okay, say I have filed a patent on the cheap. That''s fine and good. Now how do I go about defending it if a large corporation infringes? Anyone know of any David versus Goliath examples where the little inventor successfully defends his IP against the deep pockets of big business?



at 7/23/2008 11:24:02 AM, Don Sauer said:
At Bruce Horwitz''s (BruceAHz) website he has this article titled under "I Don’t Do My Own Brain Surgery Either". This reminds me of a TV show I saw where a women was actually performing self brain surgery (Trepanation) on herself. And when comparing what I saw her do to herself to some of my experiences with getting a patent written up, I have to admit that I do see the resemblance. I think in both cases an average person would be thinking to himself, "This is insanely ridiculous! Why am I putting up with this?" I think the term GIGO is referring to garbage. Well my experience has been that the inventor was always the one responsible for cleaning up any garbage. After always putting in great pain to write up a description of an invention such that your "grandmother could understand it", more times than not the person writing up your invention is far less able to understand electronics than a typical person off the street. And in that case, your first draft will come back not only not resembling your invention. It may not resemble any reality at least in this universe. And it can get much worse. Einstein could have said this. "Genius has it limits but stupidity has no bounds." Well I have encountered a case where try as hard as I could, I could not clean up the mess, and the patent actually died at the write up stage. I have alway felt guilty since I never had that much skill at understanding the claims. Now that I have been constructing some claims, I feel less helpless at taking some responsibility over them. It has become very obvious to me that the inventor is really the only one with the bottom line responsibility over all aspects of an invention. And that the person writing up the patent is really there to "help" the inventor with his responsibility. I use "help" in quotes, because that four letter word has the amazing ability to take on the meaning of any other four letter word. I have wondered how often it has been my responsibility to see to it that someone else has done their job correctly so that they could collect a nice fat pay check. If I had known what I know now, I might have responded differently to the "Put Up and Shut Up" situation. I wonder how much better I could have made everything for both myself and my company knowing what I am just discovering now.



at 7/29/2008 4:33:51 PM, RealScience said:
I have written many patent applications myself, and had patent agent write many others for me.

Do NOT write your own patent application to save money, unless you are unemployed. If you account for the time you spend writing your own, it costs FAR more than a good patent agent.

The main reason for an inventor to write a patent application is that you never understand something so well as when you try to explain it to someone else, in this case a hypothetical person with lots of knowledge and no imagination. Writing a patent application brings one face-to-face with scores of details, and thinking these through often leads to improvements in the invention.

The main reason to use a professional is to save time. But pick a patent professional with expertise in the field of the invention, or you will end up spending just as much time fixing up the mess as you would have spent avoiding it!

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