Patent Services
Patent Applications for Registration
In order to be granted a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (or foreign patent office), you must first prepare and submit an application for patent registration. Such an application for patent registration must comply with all of the laws of the United States or a foreign country.
I am experienced in the preparation and submission of an application for patent registration. I will prepare your application for patent registration accurately, to your specifications and professionally to give it the best chance for an issued patent.
Patent Application Prosecution
After your application for patent registration is submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (or foreign patent office), it will be evaluated against the requirements for issuing a patent as required by law. In many cases, there will be some reason found by the application examiner in the Patent Office for rejection.
When the application is rejected, the Patent Office issues what is called an "office action" stating the reasons for rejection and allowing time for you to respond with your reasons for why the application is either good for issue as submitted or for why it would be good for issue if modified in some way.
When we receive an office action for an application for patent registration, we must then deal with the rejection with both a factual and a legal argument, we call this "patent prosecution".
Most of the inventors that I work with are not interested in either manufacturing or practicing their invention. They just want the money from having some other person or entity producing or practicing their invention.
In this case, they must negotiate a written license to both allow the other person or entity to use or practice the invention and to spell out the royalty that they will receive for allowing them to use the invention.
After you have a patent issued to you for your invention, you have the right to file a lawsuit ("litigation") against any person or entity that is practicing your invention without your permission. If their patent infringement is done willfully with full knowledge of your patent, it is possible you could get an award of three times the usual damages.
I've found through years of experience in working with inventors that even if they don't find the invention in the market, there can be several reasons for this.
First, the invention may have been patented before, but for a variety of reasons, either never made it to market, or was taken off the market.
Second, even if the invention was not previously patented, there are already one or more close variations of it that have been patented, such that it is unlikely the present invention will be able to pass the "obviousness" standard required of new patents.
The only way to look at these possibilities is to do a patent search of previously issued or published applications for patents.