YOU have spent the holidays dreaming up fabulous ideas for products that are going to make your fortune. But now you are terrified someone is going to pinch your idea before you have had time to do anything about it. You feel you should do something about patents but don’t know where to start.
One of the biggest things that puts people off applying for a patent is the belief that it will take thousands of pounds and many years to sort out — time and money they don’t have when starting a business.
A typical patent application, which can be for a product or process, takes two to three years to grant, with a time limit of four-and-a-half years. If you are trying to get a product or service to market quickly, the prospect of spending time and energy bogged down in meetings with patent lawyers is not a cheery one.
The good news is that applying for a patent is not an isolated task that has to be completed before anything else can be done.
It can be undertaken over the first few years of your product’s life, while you are developing, making and marketing it, so that hopefully by the time you need to find the money to see your patent application through, the business itself will be able to fund it.
The first step is to file a claim with the Patent Office. This means sending an application form, which can be downloaded from the website, together with a description of your invention, including any drawings. You need to explain the main technical features of your invention and what is novel about it, and include a 150-word summary of your invention, known as an abstract. The cost of applying for a patent is £200, including a search-and-examination fee.
At what stage should you do this? The Patent Office said: “As soon as your invention is at a stage where you can actually describe it. We don’t want ideas — you need to have the embodiment of the idea, how it works and how it is made.”
Once your application has been filed you are free to discuss your invention with third parties, although you must ensure you stick to only what you have filed.
The Patent Office said: “If you are discussing it with people in manufacturing or marketing and so on, you should only be talking about the invention as you have filed it, not an adaptation of it. Otherwise if your patent doesn’t get granted because it is not new, it might be because you might have disclosed to somebody the aspect that makes it new.”
You then have up to a year to amend the patent application if you want to, and 18 months before the Patent Office will publish details of your application on its website and in its journal.
Instead of seeing this as waiting time, you should regard this 18-month period as an ideal time to start developing and even manufacturing your product or process before it is subjected to public scrutiny.
The Patent Office said: “Some people put in an application and then they find that actually their product doesn’t work, and they need to add something else. So the 18 months gives you time to refine it and see if you need to make amendments.”
Filing your patent also gives you some protection against would-be copiers of your idea. You are entitled to put the words “patent pending” on manufactured goods to indicate that would-be copiers should tread carefully. The Patent Office said: “Patent pending means a patent is not granted yet because the time to grant could be about four years and people like to get a product on the market, but the words show there is some protection.”
After 12 months you are required to send in a search form and fee to enable the Patent Office to search for any similar existing patents, and your own patent application will be examined and a report produced. At each step you may be required to make amendments — and, indeed, many applications never get granted. In 2005, a total of 17,488 requests for patents were filed, but only 3,751 were granted.
So should you pay for professional advice? About a quarter of all the patents filed each year are from private individuals, but some of those will switch to a patent agent at a later stage.
If your application is in any way complicated, then at some point it is wise to get a patent agent to advise you. Failing to use sufficiently precise wording at this stage can have enormous implications if a patent, which is granted for 20 years, is challenged in the future.
Unfortunately, this is also where the costs start to mount. Hiring a patent agent to help you through the process can cost thousands of pounds. However, many patent agents will give 30 minutes of free advice, which should give you an idea of what lies ahead, and the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (Cipa, 020 7405 9450) offers free advice clinics around the country; check its website for details.
The Patent Office also produces two free booklets designed to help first-timers, called Patents Application Guide and Patents Essential Reading. Both can be downloaded from its website or are available by calling the Patent Office helpline (0845 950 0505).
Another valuable way of paying for the professional advice you need to ensure your patent application is watertight is to enter into a partnership with a company in a similar field that will shoulder the costs in return for a portion of the eventual income.
This was the route taken by Ron Hamilton, the Scottish entrepreneur who invented daily disposable contact lenses. At a time when most people changed their contact lenses every couple of years or so, Hamilton developed a process that enabled him to make lenses that were cheap enough for people to use new ones every day.
He found a patent agent to help him put together his application and then entered into an agreement with British Technology Group, which markets bright ideas from academia, whereby he assigned the patent to them in return for 50% of the ensuing income. The total cost of getting all the international patents granted eventually ran to £200,000, a sum that Hamilton would never have been able to afford.
Once the patent was granted, Hamilton was able to get additional investment and within three years was able to sell the business, including the intellectual property, to Bausch & Lomb, the eyewear company, for £33m.
He said: “Patents are central to creating value in a business. Intellectual property runs right through every aspect of the business — it is not an add-on. You can develop the business without a patent, but it will be valueless because it can be replicated.
“You must give yourself a competitive advantage and to do that you must look at every aspect of protecting your intellectual property, from making sure that it features in your conditions of employment right down to getting a tool manufacturer to assign all the copyright to you.”
Hamilton said that using the services of a professional patent agent was invaluable. “Without a patent agent the intellectual property would have been pinched, there is no question about that.
“You need to include specific terms to give your patent the solidity it needs. I believe it is a misconception that you can file a patent for £200. You probably can — but you will lose it in about two years because you get what you pay for.”
www.patent.gov.uk
www.cipa.org.uk
