One thing you may want to look at is filing a provisional patent application.
The fee is $100. The purpose is basically to buy you time.
You’d have to file a utility patent within one year, but during that year you can explore the business viability of your idea. If it doesn’t seem viable, you just lost $100. If it is viable, you at least established that you had the idea on your filing date, so that if someone comes up with the same idea six months from now, you’ve beaten them to the punch.
What matters though is the date of conception, rather than filing date, so if someone conceived the idea three years ago, they’ve beaten you to the punch, even if they file after you.
I’m not a patent attorney, but I have filed (provisional) patents on my own.
Just wanted to drop in to again thank you all for the responses. For the last couple of days I have been moving my office at work (the patent has nothing to do with the work I do).
I need to start packing for an overnight trip right now. I’ll try to return to this on Sunday. I have some more questions.
for an individual, patenting the invention in multiple countries (essential if it is of any serious worth) will probably bankrupt him on its own. Some companies these days deliberately avoid doing a patent search before going to market, and rely on (i) the patent holder never finding out and (ii) tying the whole thing up in litigation for years if he does, and offering a small amount to settle - which he would be smart to accept.
The way it was explained to me was that the penalty for knowingly violating a patent is greater than not knowing, and thus never doing a search kept you from knowing.
This in my opinion is a huge problem with patents today. In theory the point of having patents is to get knowledge out to the general populace by making the contents of the patent public. That way people can learn from what others have done. This creates an incentive to not learn from what others have done.
It’s not a defense - but willfulness is a damage enhancer. If you don’t know about a patent, you can’t willfully infringe it (probably - there was some interesting language in a recent case).