Businesses are run on a global scale, 24/7. If a business is not innovative it will be left behind. Surviving today’s business competition requires new thinking and new business patterns.
How can you make sure your businesses will stay competitive and therefore profitable? There is one legal avenue that cannot be overlooked: Intellectual Property, which includes copyright, trademark and patent.
In this short article, we will briefly examine patent law and how patent increases business competitiveness. If you have a useful invention and it meets the legal requirement of new (not anticipated, 35 U.S.C. §102), non-obvious (not simple variation/combination of something else, 35 U.S.C. §103) and functional, then you may have a chance of getting a patent issued to your invention. There is no requirement that an invention has to be great in its technical substance. There is no requirement that an invention has to be earth-shattering. Your invention just needs to meet that legal requirement for it to be patentable.
By having a patent issued to your invention, you can then have the chance of stopping others from copying, imitating your same invention, unless you allow them to do so, usually in the form of paying some royalty fee to you. A lot of new businesses today thrive on their intellectual achievement, which is oftentimes embodied in the form of inventions being patented. That way, inventors are awarded properly for the intellectual contribution to the society, while the society gets to practice inventor’s intellectual fruit. A patent owner enjoys the limited period of exclusive right, until the patent expires.
Means of production are made cheaper and more available today. If an invention is not protected, everyone can bring a new invention overseas and have it re-produced. A business, when following the legal avenue of patenting its invention, will then have the chance to stop people from wholesale copying of its invention and get to enjoy the intellectual fruits, justifiably. Certainly, having an issued patent is not equal to a ticket to financial security. Market conditions play a big role in the valuation of a patent. However, this market issue is well beyond the scope of legal protection addressed in patent law and is left to business owner’s analysis and discretion.
Jen-Feng Jeff Lee is a patent attorney and a partner at World Esquire Law Firm LLP. He focuses on the practice of intellectual property laws. For more information, please call 661-294-0911.