I watch a lot of Sunday afternoon infomercials, and I’m always amazed at all these fantastical inventions that claim to help you lose weight, reduce wrinkles, make your dog read Homeric poetry, etc. etc.
I don’t have a specific example at the moment, but I can nevertheless vaguely recall infomercials that proudly extolled “patented designs,” and how many patents they have. I think Oil of Olay beauty cream does it too.
The purpose of mentioning the number of patents, I suspect, is to give their boastful claims a greater sense of legitimacy. I surmise that there are three possibilities for this to be true:
Their product actually works as advertised and it patented as such.
A superfluous part of their invention has been patented (e.g., an ergonomic handlebar on an exercise machine), but not the device as a whole.
Patenting a device, cream, tonic, or widget is not in any way related to making a claim as to its effectiveness.
Which one of these, if any, is true? Thanks in advance!
Getting a patent does not require that you show something actually works. In particular, it absolutely does not require that it is effective. So having a new kind of widget that is supposed to stop snoring does not require that it actually does so. It just means that the patent office though that the invention was novel and met the requirements of a patent.
ETA: I have 10 patents, some of which are pretty trivial.
Don’t know if it is still required, but around the latter part of the 19th century the Patten Office started requiring that all patents for a perpetual motion machine be accompanied by a working model. I rather expect that this requirement is still on the books.
As others have said, it doesn’t have to work and there is no requirement that you even tried to make it work. On the other hand, you can’t get a patent unless you can convince the patent examiner that the patent is useful, so your option three is not quite right either.
An invention must be useful, novel, and not obvious in order to be patentable. The standards for this are amazingly lax, however.
Don’t be confused by the term “reduction to practice,” the date of which is important if someone else files for a patent on the same thing. In the weird parlance of patent attorneys, the act of filing for the patent is considered a “constructive reduction to practice.”
IANAL but speaking from some limited patent experience myself (7 successful patent applications), while proof of ‘working’ may not be required I’d be very surprised to see an examiner grant a patent if the examiner didn’t believe the thing could work.
Regarding infomercials; just because an item has a patent number on it doesn’t necessarily mean that the patent covers all or even any of the merits being claimed in the commercial. In example the patent for a piece of exercising equipment may indeed have a claim about exercises that it enables, but that doesn’t mean that ‘losing weight’ is covered by the patent.
Sure…but the key word there is ‘believe’. I also don’t think they would issue a patent if they believed that the thing wouldn’t work. As in the past though (you can look back on some of the patents issued throughout the years for some really good laughs), belief does not always translate into reality.
(My own experience with the process comes from the fact I used to work for Patent and Trademark in Crystal City…in fact, I helped build their old token ring network and also the more modern ATM campus network I presume they are still using these days. Less anyone think I’m appealing to authority here, I was in IT, so my experience with the examiners and clerks was from that perspective. Still, I was involved at least peripherally with the process, at least from supporting them as users and preparing the patent information for public consumption).
A patent has to be enabled in order to be valid. In other words, the patent has to describe the process or device in question to the extent that “a person of ordinary skill in the art” will be able to duplicate it.
In other words, if you apply for a patent on a new drug for treating the symptoms of chronic malaise whose active ingredient is a chemical compound that combines purple kool aid with green jello, then you have to describe the process sufficiently that the person reading the patent can take purple kool aid and green jello and come up with the compound that you’re claiming.
However, you can’t apply for a patent on a compound made of “manna from heaven” and “nectar of the gods” because no one with skill in the art is going to be able to come up with those things.
On the other hand, your final compound doesn’t have to actually be proven effective for treating chronic malaise for the patent to be issued. That’s an issue that the Food and Drug Administration is going to handle.
Yes, the Patent and Trademark Office is lucky enough to come into contact with a startlingly large number of misunderstood geniuses and unrecognized prodigies whose inventions can’t be understood by anyone else in the world.
And it must be a work of man, not a work of God! (Which is interpreted to mean pure mathematical algorithms can not be patented.)
As JWT Kottekoe implies, the standards are lax. Some ideas which might seem too obvious to publish, might form part of a patentable claim because, since never published, they’re “novel”! And it seems very unlikely that patent examiners would be able to confirm utility in most cases.
A patent can be challenged on patentability even after issued, although for it to be profitable to challenge someone else’s patent on the grounds that the invention was not useful would seem to be an unusual scenario. :dubious:
