Programmable Products

In our experience, the best patents are those with a large amount of involvement from the inventor. The more initial work the inventor can provide in describing, drawing, and researching the prior art, the patent will have a lower amount of rejections and reduce the legal charges to write and prosecute. For US patents, the patent office offers a free paten search engine. www.uspto.gov Searching for prior art provides the inventor some information if the idea was already patented, and provides the patent agent information on similar devices. Programmable Products could assets in prior art searches in several ways. First, we could coach the inventor on methods and keywords to use when searching. Second, we could interpret the patent and provide guidance to the relevance of the prior art. Third, we could do a search and provide feedback on the prior art found. It should be noted that no search can be guaranteed since there are many forms of prior art, and there is a lag in the publishing of applications filed in the patent office. Also, prior art includes any publication anywhere in the world. Once the prior art search is completed, a brief description of the patent, a drawing, and a list of the novel concepts in the patent needs to be provided. From this, Programmable Products will generate the patent, formal drawings, claims, and generate the required documents to be filed in the patent office. This is the majority of work required for the patent filing, and typically costs between $4000 to $9000 depending on the scope of the patent, and the number of modifications with the inventor. The general rule of thumb is the better document the invention is prior to the authoring of the patent, the lower the cost of filing. It should also be noted that there are several patent office fees required. www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009september15.htm#patapp