Watching late night TV I often see commercials for new products that use the term “Patent Pending” and wonder if people really know what this means. Patent pending simply means you have filed your patent application in the patent office and it is still “pending” or waiting for an official approval. It is not the […]
Almost every day I get a question from someone asking about protection with their provisional patent application (PPA). This is always tricky to answer because first we need to understand what is meant by the word “protection”. I usually try to break it down into two types of protection: Protection from people trying to copy […]
No doubt you or someone you know has come up with a clever way to solve a problem and has heard it said, “You should patent that idea!” For many people, inventions and ideas are the same. To the Patent Office, ideas and inventions are very different. The Patent Office requires Non-Provisional patent applications to […]
The first section of a patent application is the “background” section. Many inventors write lengthy background sections which attempt to explain how the inventor came to invent the invention, how the invention is better that a number of existing inventions, and even some background on the inventor themselves. If I had to guess, this seems […]
Many inventors that write their own patent applications use the term “consists of” instead of the preferred term”comprises”. For example, if their invention is a new mixture, they may write “my invention consists of A, B, and C”. To the Patent Office, these words (consists of vs. comprises) have very different meanings. While this […]
Just about every patent application submitted to the patent office will face an obviousness rejection. But what exactly makes an invention “obvious” to a patent examiner? According to the law (35 U.S.C. 103), even if a claimed invention is not identical to an earlier inventio, a patent on the invention cannot be obtained if the […]