Home > Blog

Dead or Alive? Determining if a Patent is in Force

by Stewart Walsh

When a patent is in force, the owner has a monopoly on who can make and sell the underlying invention (or at least what’s covered in the claims).  So determining whether or not a patent is in force can often be a million dollar question. Patents can be expired for several reasons: age of the [...]

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Patentability Opinions ($) vs. Non-Infringement Opinions ($$$$)

by Stewart Walsh

If you’re wondering whether or not your invention is patentable, you’re probably simultaneously wondering if your invention might infringe on someone else’s patents.  These two questions go hand in hand, and they seem to be a rephrasing of the same question: should I go ahead with this?  There’s just one problem, answering these two questions [...]

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

What is a USPTO Registered Practitioner?

We are sticklers for detail, and so when talking with customers, we often use the very clunky term “USPTO registered practitioner” when other people would just say “patent attorney.”  We use this term, registered practitioner, because patent attorney is too narrow.  Also, you may miss an important detail about registered practitioners, namely that they are [...]

Read the full article →

Spotting Invention Scams

Scam invention companies are prevalent all over the country, in spite of legislative and regulatory attempts to shut them down. Recently we learned that an old friend of ours was taken by a well known invention scam company to the tune of $36 thousand dollars. We decided to write out an article of things detailing [...]

Read the full article →

Why We Switched to WordPress (and why you should to)

Every business needs a website (especially a web-based business).  When we started our web-based business, Simple Patents, in 2005, we built our website from scratch, spending thousands of dollars and months figuring out how to put it all together.  In the end, we had something that worked.  It was secure.  It was informative.  It looked [...]

Read the full article →

IP Theft & Counterfeiting in China

More interesting tidbits from the USPTO’s China Road show Many American inventors live in paralyzing fear of counterfeiting, especially Chinese counterfeiting.  They imagine their great ideas getting knocked off for cheap by Chinese gangsters and the fake products overrunning every market in the world, including the US. Counterfeiting is always a threat, especially if your [...]

Read the full article →

Chinese Patents

I attended the USPTO’s China Roadshow last week and learned a little about Chinese patents, how they differ from US patents and how the Chinese IP scene works. An interesting factoid, China’s patent system borrows heavily from Germany.  Apparently, when they were setting up their patent system in the 80s they had a lot of [...]

Read the full article →

Simple Patents at the NAPP Conference

Pat was a guest speaker at the annual conference of the National Association of Patent Practitioners.  His speech was on patentability research.  This is, of course, our major service to inventors and IP professionals alike, and we know quite a lot about doing good research and getting good results.  So when the folks at NAPP [...]

Read the full article →

Differences Between Patent Applications and Patents

Starting about 10 years ago, the USPTO added published patent applications to their searchable database.  As the backlog of unexamined applications has increased, this collection has become more and more important to research.  For newer technology, it’s much more likely to find relevant art in the published applications than it is in the patents. When [...]

Read the full article →

A Word About Patent Classification

Classifactions are categories into which patents are placed based on their features.  Every patent document contains at least one, and in most cases, 3-4 classifications.  There are just under 500 main classes, which are subdivided into several hundred subclasses each, adding up to over 100,000 classifications.  Notation for class and subclass is written class/subclass.  The [...]

Read the full article →