> What did Arthur C Clarke do with the idea of satellites? He had an idea of how
> an artificial satellite worked and released it to the public at large so that noone
> could actually patent them. Is that the same sort of thing? Could Clarke have
> patented the idea of an artificial satelitte?
Clarke did not come up with the notion of artificial satellites; rather, he came up with the idea of geosynchronous satellites.
cankerist writes:
> Yes, X-ray was being rude (terse) . . .
It’s rude to be terse? I often write only a single sentence for a reply. I do it because I would be wasting your time if I was to write more than necessary. The important thing is to write just as much as necessary, neither more nor less.
Clarke couldn’t have patented the idea because he didn’t know how to implemented. With a lot of modern patents, however, especially “business-method” patents, the implementation is merely writing a few lines of software, so it’s not hard to see why a lot of people see these as, in effect, the patenting of mere ideas.
I thought X-Ray comment was rude because it didn’t supply any information which might be useful to judge whether or not the comment was correct and it failed to advance the discussion in a meaningful way.
Basically, a patent is a form of intellectual property in which you can get exclusive rights to an idea, in contrast with copyright or trademark. However, you generally have to be able to show that you know how to implement that idea. Generally, you can’t just cordon off an idea and wait around for someone else to figure out how to do it.
Huerta, I don’t usually use the Dope to talk shop, but you’ve touched on a right old hornet’s nest there!
The UK and EPO do allow some computer programs and certain types of algorithm (eg, encryption) so long as they have a “technical effect” and could not somehow be performed with “pen and paper”. But business methods are still refused on a regular basis.
Indeed, this whole bone of contention between the US and Europe about what patents can and cannot be granted for is largely why you cannot simply file an application anywhere in the world and get a worldwide patent.
As per the advice of several posters in this thread, I e-mailed a basic inquiry to a local law firm specializing in patents and trademarks. He wrote back saying the cost of filing a patent application is typically $4000 to $7000 in services and government fees and the total cost of obtaining a patent can easily exceed $10,000.
I don’t have that kind of money laying around, so it’s probably a moot point for me now trying to get a patent.
Walloon has it the most right, with honorable mention going to Huerta88 for describing the practicality, or better, the law in application. Let me add/clarify a couple of things:
Oh, IANYL, and the Patent Bar can go kiss my @$$ (in every respectful, non-unethical way that is possible)
There are basically 5 steps as I recall (both of law and for practical application):
Original
For the pursposes of this discussion, this is pretty self-explanatory. It can’t already have existed/filed for someone else. It has to be your invention (note, not an idea, more on that below). However, you can assign it, and depending on your employment agreement (and your function at your company), you may have to assign it to your employer. Note, there is a difference in the US law and everywhere else. The US has the first to invent requirement. The rest of the world (iirc) has the First to File requirement, meaning that for whatever reason you are using (use as in the commercial sense) it, you have a year to file it (IIRC) and you must file before someone else.
Patentable subject matter
Ideas are not patentable and neither are laws of nature (or things that occur naturally); mental process (except physcial transformations and process or method patents (arguably one and the same; the method patent has to produce a significant amount of product); arrangement of data, which (confusingly enough) includes musical arrangement and algorithims (despite its usefulness) which only/merely manipulates an abstact idea; and scientific principles (laws of nature, again). Ideas are treated differently by the patent law. What you should be concerned about is inventions. Inventions are patentable, even though, at hand, may be intangiable and seem only like an idea.
Useful
3 things: a) beneficial to society, or it’s completely destructive - I believe this is not patentable by Congress; b) operable or capable of being used in any way; c) if the invention works to solve the problem it was designed to solve
Novel
It has to be new. Novel can also includes non-obviousness, depending on how you look at it, but I like to think of them as separate idea. Also, the actual patent has to disclose prior art, or that which the inventor used to create the invention. Also, this disclosure must be enabling, that if one of ordinary skill in the art can do what the patent says. Disclosure and enablement are also huge topics that you’ll probably need a patent lawyer to wade through.
non-obvious
Add something significant to the prior art, that is non-trivial. Prior art, simply, is anything in that exists to the public that makes the invention obvious. Such factors include: the scope and content of the prior art; differences between the claimed invention and the prior art; level of ordinary skill in the art. Alsok, look at objective evidence of non-obviousness such as: Commercialability; long-felt but unsolved need;previous failure (of others); copying by others; unexpected results. One could probably teach a whole semseter on this topic alone.
To answer your question: yes, you don’t actually need a product, you can actually get a patent for the invention, even though you never built it. It depends largely on your patent law attorney, and your skills at describing the invention, and the actual invention. If you claim a matter transportation device, someone at the patent office will probably need to see it work no matter how well you wrote the application (assuming the science behind it is light years ahead of anyone’s understanding). If there is a lot of prior art, and the ordinary skill is such that it is easy to envision the invention without actually building it, then such a strict test will most likely not be necessary.
Yes, the cost of the patent application and getting patent can average $20k. However, if you think that there is a lot of applicable uses for it, I argue, then it’s worth the investment. It’s a lot easier to wrangle fees from EOMs and license the product out to recoup the $20k investment.
Atreyu, even if you decide not to go for a patent, many lawyers will offer a first interview for free (australia again). They will chat with you for an hour or two, lay out your options. It’s free because they want your ‘business’ though.
We also have things called community legal centres in Australia, which offer free basic legal advice, regardless of your income etc. Perhaps there is some equivalent in the States. Another option might be a chat to the lawyers at the hospital where you work - if it’s a research hospital, they’d probably know heaps about it.
It still can’t hurt to write your idea down in detail before you go to a lawyer, or even if you don’t. Apart from the IP law implications, it couldn’t hurt to be sure of your invention etc. Good luck…
Wendell Wagner - agree with you there. “The important thing is to write just as much as necessary, neither more nor less.” In this case, wouldn’t you say he wrote a lot less than was necessary, and that he came across as condescending as a result? Perhaps, a succinct “Yes it is” may be forgivable when you are in the right, but when you are stone cold wrong can you get away with it? I don’t think so.
Well, lawboy, I don’t know which reckless individual put you in charge of handing out the awards, but so long as we are ranking the usefulness of posts made in this thread, let me point out that your blind recitation of what you half remember from law school or have cribbed from various websites, is not helping to clarify anything here. Rather, you are merely repeating what others have already said, and, in some cases, you are adding to the confusion. I’ll say it simply, your grasp of Patent Law is not strong enough for you to be giving advice.
[As an Aside] “Walloon has it most right” (from simply copying and pasting from the USPTO website). Perhaps you should have said “The USPTO has it most right, as pointed out by Walloon who copied and pasted from their website”. ?
A “usefulness” requirement? -
Although Section 101 of the U.S. Patent Act states that an invention must be ‘useful’ to be patentable, by pointing this out you are being misleading. Why? Because a patent need NOT be what the average man in the street would call ‘useful’ or ‘beneficial’ (your word) to society. For example, patent no.6,368,227 a “method of swinging on a Swing” is not what most people would call useful or beneficial to society. Some are even what the average man would call harmful (although not strictly against public policy). You need to have a look at the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure which will explain to you what the utility requirement is.
You go on to state it needs to be “operable or capable of being used in any way”. Now, I don’t know what that means to you, but it seems to cover every single thing in existence. So I’m glad you put it in there because it was good for a laugh, but frankly, if there is a risk that someone is going to take your post seriously, then it’s probably best that you don’t slip in little pearls of nonsense in the future.
There’s a lot more wrong with your post, and if I have time later this week I’ll come back and deal with the rest.
Thanks. In fact artificial satellites were described in a story from 1876. I also think that what might have been patentable by Clarke was the notion that geosynchronous satellites could be used as communications satellites - that is what would make the invention useful.
I have two patents for what are basically algorithms (or more properly, Bell Labs has them.) Another has been filed. In the two older ones, the patent attorney wrote it to emphasize them being executed on a computer, and thus were more like a hardware implementation than a mere algorithm. The last one seemed to be written more as a process. Can any patent attorneys tell me if the patent office is letting applications for patents for algorithms look more like algorithms?
My favorite experience - one person who worked for me had her patent rejected based on prior art - from another person who worked for me. Our patent attorney really enjoyed sending an affadavit from the author saying the examiner was wrong. I think it made his year.
I know a little something about inventing and patents, having been a member of an invention club for some years and currently working on some of my own ideas. However, the more I learn, the less I seem to know. It’s a complicated subject. Here are a few resources that may answer people’s questions. Use as you see fit:
Don’t rely on this as legal/patent advice; it’s not. But . . .
Yes. At a guess, your patents may date to around the era of the Alappat decision, at which point the U.S. was more liberal than it had once been (no longer rejecting per se inventions involving algorithms and software), it was still about where Europe and Japan are today – there was a strong preference for “reifying” the algorithm in a machine-like, tangible object or process. E.g.: An algorithm for calculating optimal factory processing temperatures: might not pass muster. A machine for controlling processing temperature, including an algorithm for providing temperature adjustment commands: likely much better received.
Since then, the U.S. mindset has become substantially more liberal. State Street Bank is a case that comes to mind (finding business method claims patentable, albeit in the context of a computer system), and subsequent cases have, I think, explicitly stated that the claim need not necessarily involve a computer. Many will include the computer or tangible output/manifestation (“technical effect,” as the Euros would put it), even though it isn’t strictly necessary, if only because as a practical matter, that’s where most of the commercial apps. are.
I used to work for the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) as a Patent Examiner. In training, I asked the same question. In general, any sci-fi idea would have to give such extreme detail to enable one to make and use this product. (This is known as disclosure, for starters.) If some info is in a sci-fi book, but is not enough to satisfy a [Patent] Examiner, then the Examiner would claim that disclosure has not been met. Otherwise, the Examiner might use it as a reference against a pending patent application. (It is subjective, so often these things get disputed mostlikely inside the Patent Office, but conceivably outside in the courts.)
Most examiners, however, would look for better sources than sci-fi books! And, patents come in so many “shapes and sizes”, figuritively speaking, that Clarke’s ideas alone could not preclude ALL satellite patents from being issued. [For example, go read the claims of a patent without looking at its title or drawings. Can you figure out what they’re describing? Not easy, though, is it?] Also, I should add that laws of physics and math cannot be claimed in a Patent as part of the invention.
Last, I wanted to mention that a method of doing something can be patented. The method does not need apparatus to go along with the claims. So, such patents do not even include drawings! In this regard, ideas can get patented, I would argue. I think such patents are hard to defend day-in and day-out, however.
Also, think about this: Patents on the UPC bar codes, for example, were issued even before the laser was around to read 'em! And, it is true that a working model is not required, nor does the dang thing have to even work or be profitable, but don’t go claiming something which defies physics, however. A working model CAN be requested by the Examiner! - Jinx
Of course, the most prominent example of a ridiculous business-method patent was the one on one-click-ordering, which required Amazon (or was it Barnes and Noble?) to insert a pointless second click in its Web ordering process.
I’ve been to conferences where patent lawyers say with absolute straight faces that all business methods should be patentable and that it should be perfectly okay for an enterprise to block other companies to compete on equal terms. One of them said that American Airlines (or whoever it was) should have been allowed to patent frequent flyer miles (assuming they would have sought a patent for it at the time).
Of course, there’s a crucial difference between the first silly patent(s) and the second cited one: the latter hasn’t collected hundreds of millions of dollars.
Here’s a point that I don’t think was covered before - a patent is not the golden path to printing money. All a patent realistically gives you is the right to sue someone who infringes on it or to possibly block the entry of the infringing product into the USA. Undertaking such a suit is a seriously expensive proposition and will usually cost a minimum of 250k and more likely, at least several million dollars. There are stories about how some companies, knowing the inventor has no backing, have basically said, “so sue me” and kept right on manufacturing and selling the product they stole. Also, there is a statistic floating around that something like 95% of the patents issued have never made a dime, let alone the money back that it cost to get one issued. If you’re going to get a patent, you better understand marketing, sales and possibly manufacturing, because you are going to either license it to someone else or become a manufacturer yourself.
> Wendell Wagner - agree with you there. “The important thing is to write just
> as much as necessary, neither more nor less.” In this case, wouldn’t you say
> he wrote a lot less than was necessary, and that he came across as
> condescending as a result? Perhaps, a succinct “Yes it is” may be forgivable
> when you are in the right, but when you are stone cold wrong can you get
> away with it? I don’t think so.
O.K. I thought you were saying that being terse in itself was being rude. In the sort of case you describe, I would say that the person is being arrogant in not explaining themselves further. In such a case, I would reply, “So explain carefully to me why you think my post was wrong.”
It’s a complicated subject. Here are a few resources that may answer people’s questions. Use as you see fit: