What protection does a patent provide you with other nations? What if people independent of each other in the UK, US, Japan, India, or what-have-you submitted or received a patent for devices that are similar enough to infringe on each other? Or, if there’s a patent in another nation on something I want to patent here, how would the US PTO know?
Treaties. For example, the US and Canada have a treaty for patents that basically say “You respect ours, and we’ll respect yours.” It’s called the Patent Cooperation Treaty and covers Canada, the United States, Mexico, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, China, and Russia.
Right, but what about the issue of overlapping patents? I can’t imagine the USPTO can check all nations and visa versa. Maybe it just doesn’t come up much.
From the website linked previously:
So the US patent office doesn’t check in other nations, that is done by the International Preliminary Searching Authority.
If you wanted the US PTO (Patent and Trademark Office) to start checking other countries patents before working on ones filed in the US, I would shudder at the increase in the backlog.
If you ever saw how US Patent Examiners worked, you would be stunned. For people who deal with high tech materials, it is a remarkably low tech procedure loaded with paperwork.
Actually, there are nations and groups of nations for which you make patent applications separately. IIRC the EU, or at least part of it, is one group, the old Warsaw pact countries were another, and many Asian nations are part of yet another. Japan’s patent system is really very different, and grants patents for things that practically no other countries do.
The USPTO doesn’t check too far to see if something is patentable. They search their own patents. If something has been in the public domain before your application, and anybody can demonstrate this, your patent will be held invalid by whatever court you use to sue somebody for infringement (and after all a patent is nothing more than a license to sue infringers). When you apply, you have to tell the USPTO what you know about prior art and similar inventions - it’s a federal crime not to. That being said, if during their small search they don’t turn anything up, and if the other requirements are met, they’ll give you the patent. Your real expense will begin when you try to take someone to court and wind up losing some or all of your patent (that is, some or all of your claims are held invalid). Among other requirements, for you to get a patent, you have to be the inventor of it, or at least the first inventor not counting those that maintained their invention as a secret (never having disclosed it into the public domain).
Getting the patent in the first place is not the hardest or most expensive part. Defending it is.