Hi Marie Veronica,
a few things to get you started: the
uspto.gov website has some online tutorials and FAQ. (US Patent and Trademark Office)
There are also some books in the style of “Patents for dummies” or similar, I used one of those books.
From my personal experience, I would be lost without a patent attorney. Maybe it’s just me, as I don’t have a legal background. But in certain instances, I still don’t understand the what and why, I just follow the instructions of our patent attorney.
You can apply for a patent on something that is:
- not obvious
- has a practical use
- was not disclosed, published, or patented by someone else before.
E.g. if you invented a new kind of can opener, go to the uspto website and search “can opener”. This way you will find out what kind of can openers have been patented by others before, what kind of “prior art” is available on your subject. If your can opener is not obvious in view of the prior art, if it represents a solution to some problem (e.g. easier or safer to operate than other can openers), and was not disclosed, published or patented by someone else before, then it satisfies the criteria for patentability.
Doing this search will probably turn up a few patents in the field of your invention, and you can read those patents to get a picture of how a patent should be written.
My group develops new medicines and I only know that field, but in our case the patent has two main parts: the “body” of the patent and the “claims”. In the body, we give a detailed description of the prior art available on our medicines, how and why the present invention is different and represents an improvement over the prior art, in what diseases will it be beneficial, a description of what the chemical structures are and how to prepare the medicines (for a new can opener it would be some drawings to show how it looks like and how it can be manufactured), and some examples of how to use the new medicines and about what kind of therapeutic effects they will produce. This was the body. Then, in the claims, we just briefly reiterate the exact chemical compounds (their structures) and their uses.
Essentially, when I write patents, I use other previous published patents as templates. And then the patent attorney modifies my draft in accord with the latest rules and regulations, and files it with the US PTO. I don’t know whether you can generalize from my experience, but I need coaching from the patent attorney.
You can file either a provisional patent application, or a full application. Most often people file a provisional application first, and then within 12 months file a full application. The provisional application is cheap (hundreds of dollars plus attorney’s fees). The full application is more like thosands of dollars filing fees, plus thousands for attorney fees. The full application is sent to a patent examiner employed by the US PTO, who will grant the patent, or reject it, or perhaps raise some objections and suggest that a modified patent with restricted claims could be allowed. After filing the full application, patent examination and obtaining the approved patent is a process that can take 2-3 years.
Maintaining an approved patent also costs money, although I don’t know how expensive it is to maintain a US Patent. For international (PCT, Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents, it goes something like this: maintenance for the first few years is cheap, perhaps less than 10K per year. But it gets more expensive with time, and maintaining a 10-15 year old patent can cost more than 100K dollars per year. However the price tarifs could be very different, hopefully much cheaper for an individual inventor or small business, compared to a large corporation. You probably need a patent attorney for those details.
