Patent It Yourself - PDF Archive

170 | PATENT IT YOURSELF
Inventor’s Commandment 9
After making your commercial evaluation and
search, carefully consider the following alternatives
before proceeding or dropping the invention: File a
Provisional Patent Application (PPA), file a Regular
Patent Application (RPA), test the market for up to a
year and then consider filing, keep it a trade secret, file
a design patent application, use a clever trade mark, use
copyright coverage, and/or use distinctive “trade dress”
for unfair competition coverage.
Now that you have a pretty good idea of the patentability
and commercial status of your invention, it is time to
make a plan for acquiring the maximum possible offensive
rights under the law. While you might think that your next
step would be to prepare and file a patent application, you
would be wrong in doing so without first considering the
information in this chapter. I suggest that your main goal
should be to profit from your invention, not to get a patent.
Although many inventors have made fortunes from their
inventions, their successes are rare and usually an exception
to the rule. Be prepared for a difficult task and pursue
commercial success diligently. If you don’t make it, try to
avoid getting disappointed; perhaps you will have better
luck in the future. In general, for most inventors my advice
is not to give up your day job.
I’ve provided a Decision Chart (Fig. 7A) to simplify and
organize your alternatives. It consists of 23 boxes with
interconnecting lead lines. The numbered, light-lined boxes
(even numbers from 10 to 40) represent various tasks and
decisions on your route to making decisions on available
options. The lettered, heavy-lined boxes (A to F and X)
represent your actual options.
The numbers in parentheses in the following discussion
refer to the boxes on the chart. While there are seven
options, several of these can be reached by several routes.
Accordingly, the following discussion is divided into more
than seven sections.
A. Drop It If You Don’t See Commercial
Potential (Chart Route 10-12-14-X)
This route has already been covered in Chapter 4, but in
order to acquaint you with the use of the chart, I’ll review it
again.
Referring to the chart, assuming that you’ve invented
something (Box 10—Chapter 2) and recorded the
conception properly (Box 12—Chapter 3), you should
then proceed to build and test your invention as soon
as practicable, or consider filing a Provisional Patent
Application (Chapter 3), provided you’re aware of all of the
disadvantages of the PPA (Box 12). If building and testing
would present appreciable difficulty, you should wait until
after you evaluate your invention’s commercial potential
(Box 14—Chapter 4), or patentability (Box 16—Chapter
5). But always keep the building and testing as a goal; it
will help you to evaluate commercial potential and may be
vital in the event of an “interference” (an expensive trial
proceeding in the PTO to determine who gets a patent
when two inventors file patent applications on the same
invention). What’s more, as you’ll see in Chapter 11, you’ll
find a working model extremely valuable when you show
the invention to a manufacturer.
Your next step is stated in Box 14—investigate your
invention’s commercial potential using the criteria of
Chapter 4. Assuming you decide that your invention
has little or no commercial potential, your answer to the
commercial question is “No,” and you would thus follow
the “No” line from Box 14 to the ultimate decision, Box X,
which says “Invent something else,” as already covered in
Chapter 4. See how easy it is?
While you may be disappointed at having spent time
and effort recording your invention, investigating its
commercial potential, building and testing it, or searching
it, your time and effort were definitely not wasted. You
haven’t failed in any way—unless you failed to learn a
lesson from your experience. Edison had 3,000 failures, yet
he regarded these as positive experiences since he learned
3,000 things he didn’t know before. Armed with what you
learned, you’ll have a better chance at success and will
encounter smoother sailing with your next invention.
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up
every time we do.”
—Confucius
B. Try to Sell Invention to Manufacturer
Without “Regular” Patent Application
(Chart Route 10-12-14-16-18-B)
This route is especially useful if you’ve filed PPA on the
invention (Box 12), but can also be used if you’ve built and
tested the invention and properly recorded your building and
testing activities. After filing a PPA or building and testing