damn, my patent gonna cost ton of money :(

[kambo]

my IP lawyer referred me to his patent lawyer friend for my robot,
and looks like its gonna cost me close to 20 K may be even more

i dont think i can afford this now

my wife have a bottling option, which can be done for little over 12K... its a very simple design.
i think we might go for that, i c more future $$$ on that, than my robot...

 

[Rochey]

There's a good arguement that more money can be made by getting into market first with a product than delaying product release and waiting for production.

20K pays for some good marketing!

/R

 

[sahib]

My humble advice would be not to waste your money. Get your product into the market and try to sell  as many and as quickly as you can. Be very careful when disclosing your designs to third parties. One of the speculative  projects I did cost me almost £10K and the parter company pulled out right before we went into production. PM me your e-mail if you want to pick my brain.

Good luck.

 

[kambo]

thanks guys,
i dont have enough capital to build many and try market them. and most investors are looking for
patent... catch 22 really..
coasting just under 10K to build one

 

[JohnRoberts]

my IP lawyer referred me to his patent lawyer friend for my robot,
and looks like its gonna cost me close to 20 K may be even more

i dont think i can afford this now

my wife have a bottling option, which can be done for little over 12K... its a very simple design.
i think we might go for that, i c more future $$$ on that, than my robot...

I have 9 patents and only paid for my last one myself.

In general patents only give you the right to sue somebody and that cost way more than $20k (more like millions $ in the US).

Patent lawsuits in China (only a recent development since the '80s) cost a lot less, but you get what you pay for.

I second the general advice to hit the ground running hard and forget the patent. One possible drawback to keeping everything secret is that somebody else might patent the technology, so perhaps file a disclosure with PTO so nobody else can patent it.

Good luck.

JR

PS: I paid less than that for my last patent but i wrote most of it myself and did all the drawings myself.  I paid a real IP lawyer to write the claims (the important part). But that was also several years ago so perhaps he'd be more expensive now too.

PPS: If investors want a patent tell them if they pay for it they can have X% of the rights. Patents are really only valuable to large companies that have the deep pockets to use them in combat.

 

[kambo]

i have to get all paperwork made for me. thats the extra cost...
for the bottle idea, we can close the patent for 12K easy....
not much to draw, and only one-two unique claims... we can manufacture and sell  / invest on this,
as its not a costly project!

i guess my robot goes  to storage for now

 

[john12ax7]

A patent helps protect from someone stealing your idea. Perhaps you could also consider a way to manufacturer that makes it difficult to reverse engineer.

 

[JohnRoberts]

A patent helps protect from someone stealing your idea. Perhaps you could also consider a way to manufacturer that makes it difficult to reverse engineer.

In theory, but in practice, it comes down to deep pockets and who has the best lawyer.  :

Probably my most valuable invention while at Peavey, was FLS, the little LEDs above each slider in a graphic EQ that showed where the feedback was occurring. Of course the idea got ripped off by a large competitor and when Peavey sued them for patent infringement Peavey lost (technically Peavey didn't win so couldn't prevent the copying).

So even being clearly the first to invent, with a patent granted and relatively deep pockets (far deeper than mine) the protection is not a sure thing. In hindsight perhaps broader patent claims might have helped, but thats what we pay the lawyers to get right.  :'(

JR

 

[kambo]

i dont have  deep pockets at all... by the sound of it,
i might as well just forget about getting a patent...
i actually wanna go military with this robot rather than public retail... with simple attachments
purpose of robot changes from being friendly to unfriendly !

 

[benb]

In theory, but in practice, it comes down to deep pockets and who has the best lawyer.  :

I think this always has been (within our lifetimes anyway) and likely always will be.

The prolific electronics writer Don Lancaster had some rants years (decades?) ago, that it's not worth getting a patent unless it's worth over $12 million or so, because you may need to spend that much defending it.

And it's certainly true that almost the exclusive entities who benefit from patents are large corporations. They amass portfolios of patents, largely so if a competitor tries to sue for infringing a competitor's patent, they can go through the competitor's products and find where the competitor is also infringing, then they can sign a cross-licensing agreement (they call it even), and neither has to be in the apparently hugely embarrassing situation (at least in corporate culture) of paying licensing fees to a competitor.

Patents are effectively corporate playing cards.

I learned all this while getting two patents in my name at a big, three-letter-domain-name company.

But patent laws sort-of changed two or three years ago, in some small attempt to fix the system and make things fairer to smaller companies and individuals who don't have lots of money to spend. There's something called a provisional patent application that's only a few hundred dollars, it gets published by the USPTO like a "real" application, but if you want to make it a real patent you have to file for the patent within a year of filing for the provisional. This helps to see if there's some "interest" in your invention before spending the money for a real patent. Another reason you want to do this is your patent claims date back to the original provisional filing. It's suggested you still do a patent search before filing a provisional. Doing it yourself sorta-counts, but not as much as paying a patent attorney a few grand to do it.

It's still gonna cost a lot of money.

I want to make an electronic keyboard that I think the market is "ready" for, but I've found three patents on it, and most recent, best written and most generally applying is by an employee of and assigned to A Pretty Powerful, Large Electronic company. I've gotten a little free advice from a patent attorney on how I could proceed, but if I manufacture this thing I'm sure I would need Expensive Advice.

 

[kambo]

damn, can someone give me a good news re patent for God Sake ;D ;D ;D

 

[JohnRoberts]

damn, can someone give me a good news re patent for God Sake ;D ;D ;D

Yup patents are cheaper in China, since they only started them back in the '80s.  ;D

Indeed big companies accumulate war chests of patents to barter with.

Yes the US has reformed patent law trying to tilt that tables against patent trolls (making it easier to challenge patents), but everything has unintended consequences.

Invest your money in branding and marketing.

JR

 

[kambo]

well, this is  very annoying to read all this... (not personal, i mean the subject matters)

patent supposed to protect the inventors right ? ! ! !
apparently not! unless its worth some millions ... isnt it  very capitalist way of thinking ?
China is not capitalist, but they are worst anyway!

unless i am gonna  make 12M no need for patent. just go for marketing/ selling it...
and let big monsters steal your idea, and let them make ton of  money out of your idea.

there is no way i can get in to chain of retail stores without big guys behind me!
and those big guys are asking if i got the patent ? well, i dont ... yet, may be never will !

very confusing, and sad and annoying....

first time virgin with patent issue
i might keep my virginity forever : ;D

may be Hillary will change all this for poor inventors (haha just kidding )

 

[Brian Roth]

In theory, but in practice, it comes down to deep pockets and who has the best lawyer.  :

The prolific electronics writer Don Lancaster had some rants years (decades?) ago, that it's not worth getting a patent unless it's worth over $12 million or so, because you may need to spend that much defending it.

Lancaster still runs an eclectic website which includes his articles about patents:

http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.shtml

It's been a few years since I browsed his site.....need to spend some time poking around there again.

Bri

 

[benb]

well, this is  very annoying to read all this... (not personal, i mean the subject matters)

patent supposed to protect the inventors right ? ! ! !

Oh, and that's another thing the law changed a few years ago. It used to be that the patent belonged to the "first to invent" something, if you can document it. There have been horrific decades-long cases on who was first to invent things, I recall one was on the Integrated Circuit, and the other really biggie was on the intermittent wiper circuit for automotive windshield wipers. That last one won the inventor something in the hundred-million dollar range - he had SHOWED just about every car maker his patented device, they were "not interested" but they all used it anyway. The decades of court cases took its toll and his whole life was about spent up when he finally won the case.

Here it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns

And so that's why "engineers journals" and such were considered so important - in one job I was given one, and told to physically write down everything I did that day or that week, date and sign it. It of course didn't quite work out that way, and the patents I got weren't what either I or the other engineer decided on or even imagined they would be (managers decided on them, and indeed they probably covered more intellectual ground than the things we picked - what a way to get a patent in my name!).

But the new law, it changed all that, despite the protestations of small inventors and groups representing them. Now a patent simply belongs to the first person to file, no ifs, ands, or buts.

 

[PRR]

> decades-long cases on who was first to invent things, ... Integrated Circuit... intermittent wiper....

Don't forget Bell vs Grey.

Two guys filed for The Telephone the same day.

Arguably Grey's plan didn't actually work. But that does not matter.

Bell had more backing and fought the thing to a pulp. So much, that with other patents (some filed on the eve of another patent expiring), Bell *appeared* to cover ANY audio system for nearly 50 years. One guitar pickup inventor was rejected because his idea "infringed Bell". (Then the lawyer gave him small money and re-worded it-- Bell's patents were all "speech", not "stringed music vibrations", got a patent.)

There's also the quick-release socket wrench. Good patent. Sears said "oh, that won't sell well!", offered a few thousand for all rights. It became about the best-selling Craftsman tool, many millions sold (I had two). Eventually the inventor forced Sears to open their books and a mediator ordered a large settlement.

> patent supposed to protect the inventors right ? ! ! !

Why? Who the heck cares about inventors' rights?

Tom Jefferson struggled with this. The idea of monopolizing knowledge did not sit well with him. He came around as he understood the true value: the inventor makes his special knowledge "public" in return for a short-term monopoly. If you want to make an improved Steel Plow, go through the patent record... a LOT of good ideas to study in there. While you can't use these ideas directly in the first 17 years, they may inspire other ideas; and after 17 years we ALL can use the ideas freely. Steel Plows came after Jefferson, but he was all into improved agriculture, and much of the history of the US midwest is about improved plows.

But yeah. In today's world, someone infringes your $20K patent, it may cost $1Meg to sue the infringer, and you gonna need ~~$13Meg of sales to justify that.

Oh, if the US Gov "needs" your patent, they will just use it. In peacetime, and often after wars, they mostly try to settle with the inventor, but they have the big stick. In WWI, the radio business was an absolute snake-nest of conflicting patents, every radio infringed multiple claims. In War Emergency, the Gov simply claimed rights to all patents. Post-war they big-sticked a Patent Pool, so WWII was not such a patent snake-pit.

 

[kambo]

wow