Patents

What is a patent?

A patent gives its owner the right to sue anyone within the jurisdiction of the patent for making, using or selling without permission a product or service that embodies the patented invention. In this way, the patent owner can prevent competitors from making, using or selling a product or service with specific desirable features or, alternatively, can collect royalties from others for permission to do so.

Why is a Patent Important?

Patents are a tool that you can deploy to implement your competition strategy, as you try to distinguish your products and services in the marketplace and erect barriers to entry against your competitors. Patents are most effective when used to protect inventions that provide uniquely better solutions to problems suffered by paying customers but that competitors could easily copy. Patents are a marketing tool, not an engineering tool. It is a misallocation of resources to patent a technically brilliant invention that has no commercial value.

A number of questions can help determine if patenting an invention would advance your marketing goals:

• What business problem is your invention aiming to solve, either for prospective customers (most likely) or for supply chain entities upstream (e.g. suppliers) or downstream (e.g. merchants, manufacturers, integrators or consultants)?
• What are the currently available competing solutions and their shortcomings?
• What business benefits does your solution offer?
• What unique approach or technology enables you to provide these business benefits?

Are there Alternative ways to Protect Inventions?

If your invention is difficult to reverse engineer or you can structure your products and services so that your invention is not delivered beyond your control (for example, some server-side inventions in Software-as-a-Service businesses), then you may choose to rely on trade secret protection.

If your customers base their purchase decisions more on overall reputation than specific technical features, then trade-mark protection can be very effective.

How Clark Wilson LLP can Provide Assistance

We can assist you with:

1. defining an intellectual property strategy that supports your competition, marketing and broader business strategies;
2. identifying what intellectual property you already have and what intellectual property you still need to acquire to implement that strategy;
3. acquiring any needed intellectual property, whether by registration, license or purchase;
4. identifying relevant intellectual property intelligence and sources of such intelligence so that you can recognize current threats and opportunities and plan for future ones; and most importantly
5. building the internal knowledge, skills, perspectives and processes into your business so that you can do as much of this as you wish in-house, turning to outside counsel only for special advice.

For more information, please contact Michael Roman.