What are the steps and costs involved in getting a Software Patent?

Similar questions: steps costs involved Software Patent.

It's a patent, there's no distinction (currently) between software and non-software The best place to start is probably the source: uspto.gov/ they have an extensive FAQ and a basic 'how to' list on the site. Keep in mind the process is not cheap though! If you look at the fee schedule, basic filing is not horribly expensive, but the research and then the renewal fees add up very quickly.

You can navigate the process on your own if desired, but it will take a great deal of time as well.

Research, Filing, Prosecution, Granting / Costs Vary In getting a patent, costs vary depending on a lot of different factors. The details of how to can be found at: uspto.gov/web/patents/howtopat.htm It is important to realize that there is an entire body of law dedicated to "patents. " If you are serious about getting a patent there are many goods books on the topic such as the NOLO book "Patent It Yourself" which will be well worth the investment.

Cost can range between 7k and over 20k depending on a lot of different factors . . .

But most of these will be lawyer fees (if you choose to use a lawyer. ) What follows, though, is a very broad overview Overview: 1. Research if the invention can be patented.

- - Time: once an invention has been created (reduced to practice) the clock starts ticking as to if you can patent the idea or not. Generally, you only have one year after the invention has been reduced to practice to patent it. (A lawyer would need to help if you want to know the other factors!) --- Invention: Is the invention novel, and useful?

Again, these terms have a legal meaning, but they also are a barrier that must be passed before something can be patented. Other factors can go into play as well. While you do do this research yourself, it is often valuable to hire a skilled patent attorney to do what is called a "patentablity search" to see if the idea is worth perusing.

2. File an Application - - After you make the call to file the application, you will need to fill it out as directed by the USPTO, listing all claims.3. Prosecution - - If you are lucky, the USPTO may grant your patent.

If they rejected you may have to go back and forth with them until your patent morphs into something they are comfortable with allowing you to patent. This is the real wildcard in terms of costs. 4. Maintenance - - After granting, you'll have to file a fee I think every 5 years to keep your patent valid.

Sources: uspto.gov/web/patents/howtopat.htm stumbler's Recommendations Patent It Yourself Amazon List Price: $49.99 Used from: $33.60 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 37 reviews) The Inventor's Notebook: A Patent It Yourself Companion 4th Edition Amazon List Price: $24.99 Used from: $16.02 .

An attorney is easier than going it alone. Plan on $2k-$8k depending on complexity. For almost any patent process you go through the same phases: Researching conflicting patents.

Writing the application. Managing the application process. For the first phase, a patent search is the best way to proceed, and although you MAY have some success I don’t recommend trying this yourself via a search engine.

I had a great idea for a patent last year, and was convinced by an associate to use an attorney to do the formal patent search. I had only found one potential conflict online, and it was a remote conflict. The attorney found SIX.

This is for something that isn’t even on the market, but it was still enough to kill my idea. A good attorney shouldn’t charge more than $500-$2,000 for this process unless your idea is particularly complicated or obscure. The money I paid in that search saved me a lot of time and money down the road trying to get a patent on something I'd never have received.

The second thing the attorney can help you with is writing the application. This isn’t just about using the same wording others use. What you put in your application is what you get the patent for - anything not covered isn't protected.

If there’s some way to twist it a bit and have it look a little different, the patent won’t protect you from it. An attorney knows how others can do that, and is in the best position to help you write yours without (as many) loopholes. Don't forget, anybody can "improve" your invention and file their own patent on the new concept, in which case you're just out of luck.

This part can be more expensive - anywhere from $2,000 to many tens of thousands of dollars for a very complicated concept, and it also depends on the quality (and greed) of the attorney. However, the payoff is huge. If you write a patent yourself, and a big firm finds some loophole and scoops your idea, what have you saved?

If your idea is worth protecting, it’s surely worth more than $2-$8k for the attorney’s services. Managing the application process means little more than filing and monitoring what's going on. Expect to wait a while, as the USPTO is very backlogged.

Plan for rejection, too - will you refile? If so, how will you proceed? Better to plan for the worst while hoping for the best.

If you do go with an attorney, be sure you pick a reputable firm with a track record in this industry. That means they have one or more attorneys who specifically focus on intellectual property and patent/copyright law. They’re not exactly rare, but this isn’t something to run through your Main Street law office who primarily does real estate closings and drunk driving representations..

Software patent Software patent does not have a universally accepted definition. One definition, proposed by the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, is that a software patent is a "patent on any performance of a computer realised by means of a computer program. " Bessen & Hunt 2004 propose an alternative way of identifying software patents that is more easily used in practice.

A related term is computer-implemented invention (CII), which is used by the European Patent Office (EPO). One EPO definition of a CII is "an invention whose implementation involves the use of a computer, computer network or other programmable apparatus, the invention having one or more features which are realised wholly or partly by means of a computer program. "There is intense debate as to what extent either software patents or patents on computer-implemented inventions should be granted, if at all.

Different aspects of this debate include: * The extent to which patents for processes implemented in software should be patentable as a matter of policy; and * The inventive step and non-obviousness requirements that should be met for a patent involving software. To obtain a patent in general, inventors must file patent applications in each and every country in which they want a patent. For example, seperate applications must be filed in Japan, China, the US and India if the applicant wishes to obtain patents in those countries.

Some regional offices exist, such as the European Patent Office (EPO), which act as supranational bodies with the power to grant patents which can then be brought into effect in the member states. These different countries and regional offices have different standards for granting patents. This is particularly true of software or computer-implemented inventions, especially where the software is implementing a business method.

Thus a particular computer based patent application may be granted a patent in one country, such as the US, Japan or Australia where software is considered patentable subject matter, but be deemed unpatentable by other patent offices such as the EPO or the UK where software "as such" is excluded from patentability. The USPTO (the American patent office) has traditionally not considered software to be patentabledubious — see talk page11because by statute patents can only be granted to "processes, machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter". In particular patents cannot be granted to "scientific truths" or "mathematical expressions" of them.

This means that most of the fundamental techniques of software engineering have never been patented. The USPTO maintained this position, that software was in effect a mathematical algorithm, and therefore not patentable into the 1980s. The position of the USPTO was challenged with a landmark 1981 Supreme Court case, Diamond v.Diehr.

The case involved a device that used computer software to ensure the correct timing when heating, or curing, rubber. Although the software was the integral part of the device, it also had other functions that related to real world manipulation. The court then ruled that as a device to mold rubber, it was a patentable object.

The court essentially ruled that while algorithms themselves could not be patented, devices that utilized them could. This ruling wasn't as straightforward as many would have liked, forcing many electronic device makers into the courts to establish that their inventions were in fact patentable. Due to different treatment of federal patent rights in different parts of the country, in 1982 the U.S. Congress created a new court (the Federal Circuit) to hear patent cases.

The new circuit rejected rulings from some parts of the country, and nationalized others. For example, the court made patents generally easier to uphold by presuming patents were valid unless proven invalid and weakening the defense of non-obviousness. This court allowed issues, such as patentability of software, to be treated uniformly throughout the US.

Due to a few landmark cases in this court, by the early 1990s the patentability of software was well established, and in 1996 the USPTO issued Final Computer Related Examination Guidelines. The recent expansion of the Internet and e-commerce has led to many patents being applied for and being granted for business methods implemented in software. There have been several successful enforcement trials in the USA, some of which are listed in the list of software patents article.

Software patent vs computer-implemented invention (CII)A microsite of the EPO website states that a generally accepted and widely used definition of a CII is "an invention whose implementation involves the use of a computer, computer network or other programmable apparatus, the invention having one or more features which are realised wholly or partly by means of a computer program. " A similar definition is provided by The Guidelines for Examination at the EPO. Lobbyists, such as Florian Müller, suggest that the terms "software patent" and "computer-implemented invention" are synonymous.

The term has also been criticized as a politically motived obfuscation manoeuver. The EPO, in contrast, deny that they grant software patents. They further argue that the term software patent is itself a misleading concept since it could imply that an invention must be in the form of software to count as a CII.

The case law of the EPO and various national courts in Europe states that a computer program cannot be patented in the guise of an object or as hardware if the underlying invention is still a computer program as such. Computer-implemented invention also covers inventions relating to computer control of processes external to a computer, such as ABS braking systems. Such inventions are not caught by many definitions of software patent, such as the one proposed by the FFII.

Additionally, the EPO do not grant patents to all computer-implemented inventions since they must still provide a technical solution to a technical problem to be viewed as being inventive, whereas the term software patent implies a granted patent. Nevertheless, the fact that the EPO deem that many software-related patent applications describe inventions is a point of contention. Software patents vs copyrightSoftware patents are not the same as software copyright.

Under international agreements, such as the WTO's TRIPs Agreement, any software written is automatically covered by copyright. This allows the owner to prevent another entity from directly copying the source code and there is generally no need to register code in order for it to be copyrighted. In fact, one of the most recent EPO decisions T 424/03 clarifies the distinction, stating that software is patentable, because it is basically only a technical method executed on a computer, which is to be distinguished from the program itself for executing the method, the program being merely an expression of the method, and thus being copyrighted.

Copyleft is an informal term used to describe free software licences that uses copyright in an unconventional manner to encourage the public disclosure of improved versions of a particular piece of software. The license agreements prevent third parties from copying a given piece of source code unless said third parties agree to make their improvements to the source code available to the public under similar open source terms when they distribute the program. Patents, on the other hand, give their owners the right to prevent others from using a claimed invention, even if it was independently developed and there was no copying involved.

Patents cover the underlying methodologies embodied in a given piece of software, or the function that the software is intended to serve, independent of the particular language or code that the software is written in. Copyright prevents the direct copying of some or all of a particular version of a given piece of software, but do not prevent other authors from writing their own embodiments of the underlying methodologies. Copyright can also be used to prevent a given set of data from being copied while still allowing the author to keep the contents of said set of data a trade secret.

Software patents vs free/open source softwareThere is tremendous animosity in the free software community towards software patents. Much of this has been caused by free software/open source projects shutting down28 when the holders of patents covering aspects of a project demanded license fees that the project could not or was not willing to pay or offered licenses under terms which the project was unwilling to accept. To combat the negative press resulting from their patent portfolios, several patent holders have offered royalty-free patent licenses.

Companies that have done this include IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, Novell, Sun Microsystems and Unisys. Such actions have rarely appeased the open source community for reasons such as fear of the patent holder changing their mind or that the license terms were not found acceptable. As you can see this is a very complex topic.It would be wise to do a lot of research and get the advises from a good patent lawyer if you decide to pursue it.

Good luck! Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent .

1 Javac, regarding your answer "It's a patent, there's no distinction (currently) between software and non-software": While you are correct, there is a distinction between different types of patents software could generate. For example "look and feel" of a website could be a design patent, while "one click shopping" could be a utility patent.

Javac, regarding your answer "It's a patent, there's no distinction (currently) between software and non-software": While you are correct, there is a distinction between different types of patents software could generate. For example "look and feel" of a website could be a design patent, while "one click shopping" could be a utility patent.

If yes let me know , what are the steps involved?" "If I have a BS in Biology and get get a patent law degree...

I'm looking for a great book that will take me through the steps of writting a "Use Case" for a software app/module.

Write the steps involved in using facebook.

What are sites and areas where I can find information about writing books.

If I have a BS in Biology and get get a patent law degree...

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.