How to protect and benefit from your ideas
Via Rob Hyndman, who provides a link to a publication of the American Intellectual Property Association entitled How to Protect and Benefit From Your Ideas which is intended to assist the independent or novice inventor in protecting, evaluating and commercializing new ideas.
The publication is not a “do-it-yourself” book, but instead provides the reader with basic information to help decide whether or not to go to a patent lawyer in the first place. Patenting is generally not a “do-it-yourself” endeavour.
Although U.S. based, and focusing on U.S. law, it has some interesting information.
For example, it discusses the continuing myth which many people believe - that their invention can be protected if they write a letter to themselves setting forth a disclosure of their invention. The publication notes that this is not generally considered good practice and that any evidence obtained by this method is not likely to be sufficient to even establish a date of invention. Furthermore in many countries, including Canada, the date of invention is irrelevant. Rather the person who files their patent application first is the party entitled to a patent, when there are competing co-pending applications.
There is also a section on invention development companies. Such companies purport to be in the business of assisting inventors in making money from their ideas, but more often than not their actual business is to sell their dubious services to the inventor for an exorbitant fee. This topic which has been covered a number of times in this blog; see here, here and here.
Again, this is a U.S. publication and the laws may be different in other countries, including our own. For a Canadian perspective on bringing an invention to the market place, the book entitled From the Mind to the Marketplace looks to fit the bill. See also my previous post.