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Some ideas are worth protecting, and if you are someone who has come up with a great product you may decide that it is worth your time to meet with a patent attorney and make sure that you are able to keep the profits from what you do best. From new products for the home to school safety items that are in the highest demand right now, patent protection is important if you want to make sure that your products bring you the profit that you deserve.
And while it may be easy to say that you should get patent protection for your products, the reality is that the process is actually quite involved and complicated. In fact, without a team of knowledgeable patent lawyers helping you understand the steps that you need to take. Not surprising, patent law is especially complicated for people who would rather spend their time tinkering in a workshop or lab than filling out paper work and submitting forms. The decision to ask for legal help to work through the patent process allows product development teams and inventors to continue working on what they do best while leaving the legal details to those more qualified.
Consider some of these facts and figures about the patent law process and the various implications that they can have in different industries:
- United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued 303,051 patents in the year 2016.
- Currently, the USPTO receives six times as many applications as it did back in the year 1980.
- Patents can vary, but design patents expire 14 years from the date of issue.
- Usefulness, novelty, and non-obviousness are the three criteria that must be met in order to receive a patent.
- Utility patents, design patents, and plant patents are the three kinds of patents defined by the USPTO.
- Digital communication and computer technology claimed the first and second place in the list of technologies with the most international patent applications in the year 2016.
Finding the legal help that you need is an important step if you want to make sure that you are to protect the products that your team of individual developers create.
