The American patent office has existed for many decades, and it helps inventors get legal protection and rights for their various creations, both for fending off imitators and for making it easier to get their item produced in factories and shops across the nation. Patent laws in some form or other have existed since the 1600s in England, and in the United States, such laws have existed since the colonial period. Today, the patent office is a robust industry that allows inventors to file for provisional or permanent patent licenses for their inventions, but the issue is when an inventor is not sure how to handle this maze of paperwork, and a rejected patent is all too common today. A lot of time and effort may end up wasted if a patent application is rejected, so to get help, an inventor may reach out to an intellectual property law firm and hire a trademark lawyer, a patent attorney, or an intellectual property attorney to protect the invention from imitators and to help the inventor get his or her patent application filled out correctly and filed successfully the first time. An intellectual property law firm may be found in many cities and states across the United States, and an inventor who needs patent services may search for one online such as “intellectual property law firm in Miami FL” or “Portland patent attorney.”
Getting Patents
There are some general trends and statistics in patents today that inventors may use as a guideline to see what they are dealing with. Today, nearly 28 million small businesses can be found across the United States, and many of them may have employees who invent new items or tools for their trade, and these inventors will need legal assistance for patent law. What is more, manufacturers will probably not build a newly invented item unless all of its legal paperwork is in line, representing another reason why inventors will need legal assistance with getting a proper patent. As for intellectual property law, most of this legal work is handled by federal statutes, where copyrights are protected with the Copyright Act, parents are covered with the Patent Act, and finally, trademark protection is made possible with the lanham act, or the Trademark Act. How can an inventor navigate all of this?
Legal Help With Patents
After a person has developed a new item or tool that they believe will have commercial use and could sell well, the inventor is urged to reach out to intellectual property law firms or patent attorney firms to make sure that all paperwork is handled correctly the first time. To help the lawyer do their job, an inventor may provide blueprints, schematics, and photographs of their item to help make the case stronger and help the lawyer know exactly what kind of item they are dealing with. Once the paperwork is ready, and the lawyer is sure that the invention has commercial value, the paperwork is submitted, often for a provisional patent. This is a temporary patent that acts as a placeholder while the inventor makes any final adjustments to their invention, although no new components may be added. Once an invention is completely ready, an application for a non-provisional patent license is submitted. This is what is known in everyday terms as a “patent,” although patents really come in the provisional and non-provisional varieties.
What is more, an inventor should keep in mind that after their application has been submitted, they can expect a wait of nearly a full year for the results, so in the meantime, the inventor is urged to continue tinkering with their item or new projects, and otherwise stay busy so they do not waste an entire year waiting for their patent results. It may even be possible for an inventor to submit a patent application for a different invention while their first patent application is still being processed, and a person may be waiting on multiple applications.