Patenting Your Inventions

Patenting your inventions can create a tremendously valuable asset for you or your employer. It can also protect you from the costly legal battles that can arise from inadvertently infringing someone else's patent.

Patents are intended to encourage inventors to disclose their invention, in return for exclusive rights to it for a limited but lengthy time period. I'm not qualified to give legal advice, and if you're going to do this you must seek advice from a patent attorney. However, I will give a couple of tips on writing patents from an engineers perspective.

The rules vary from country to country, but generally a patented invention must be novel and not obvious to a person skilled in the art. What seems obvious to you may not be what seems obvious to a patent office examiner; especially in hindsight. To be considered obvious, it needs to have been obvious before you heard about it, not just after. In my experience, many engineers consider ideas to be obvious that patent office examiners do not; so most engineers routinely disregard potentially patentable inventions as being “obvious”. If you're a smart engineer and you had to think about it even just a tiny bit, it's probably patentable; so long as someone else hasn't gotten in first. The relevant question is whether the invention is of sufficient commercial value to justify the time and cost involved in patenting it.

There is a school of thought that says that if patent office examiners were smarter, they'd be out inventing things of their own, not just reviewing other people's work; so the bar they use to measure a great idea may well be lower than yours. On the other hand, Albert Einstein worked for a while as a patent examiner.

A patent must describe an invention in sufficient detail for another person skilled-in-the-art to build your invention without requiring them to make an inventive step of their own. Writing a patent is different to writing a design description, although they cover essentially the same material. If you're following my other advice, your design descriptions aren't merely an end-product of your design; they are a key part of the process. So when you start writing one, you haven't yet designed the thing in question. When you start writing a patent application on the other hand, you should already have a complete notion of how the invention works.

While a design description tends to contain descriptive text with supporting diagrams, a patent is the other way around: it contains a series of diagrams describing the invention followed by supporting text describing how the diagrams work to define the invention. My rule of thumb is that a patent application should contain roughly twice the number of diagrams as the related design description and each of the diagrams in a patent should be “dumbed down” a bit as you have twice as many to introduce the design with. Once you have a complete design description, writing a patent application is a relatively easy matter of drawing a series of diagrams with all the parts numbered, describing each diagram and its component parts in detail, adding a description of the prior art to justify why your invention is necessary, writing an abstract and drafting the claims. At each step of the way, you want to be in touch with your patent attorney to ensure you're still on the right track. Reading other patents will give you a feel for the format; for example see my inventions described in US Patents 6,954,803 and 6,505,283 and co-inventions in US Patents 6,145,064 and 6,237,079

The claims are the really important legal part of a patent; they define what is in and what is out of the scope of the patent. In doing so they stake out a territory of legal protection and rights that are enforceable against other designers. You definitely need advice from a patent attorney to draft the claims; everything else in a patent can be written by a reasonably skilled engineer, but the claims require specific legal language that us mere mortals aren't generally familiar with.

The title and abstract of your patent should describe your invention as succinctly as possible. There is a school of thought that says that these should be obfuscated in order to make it difficult for other engineers to find your patent during database searches, making it easier to launch submarine patent-like attacks on your competitors. There is another school of thought that say that those subscribing to the former school of thought should to be interred at the bottom of the ocean in a Kursk-like disaster.

Patent offices around the world including the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and the European Patent Office have searchable databases on the Internet, giving access to patents granted in their respective countries and general information about patents. Other sites like Free Patents Online also provide useful patent search and reference information.

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