Headmaster of PatentLessons.com     Bill Guess

    Bill is an independent inventor living in Baton Rouge, La he is also a professional musician and partner in Studio 1 recording facility.  Bill also has 7 patents currently pending in the U.S. and foreign patent offices.    Bill was selected as one of the top 100 inventors in a recent InventNow.org event co sponsored by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office and the National Inventors Hall of fame.   Finalists are being provided with air and hotel accommodations in Orlando to exhibit their inventions at Universal Studios on March 26 and 27, 2004.                                                                              

     Dear inventor/designer, educator, engineer, lawyer, judge, college or high school student or anyone else, 

These lessons were designed to teach anyone, and I mean anyone, how to patent their ideas.  Before I continue, take a look at that phrase "patent their ideas".  Patent attorneys love to say that ideas aren't patentable.  Hogwash.  That's what you do:  you have a good idea, then, if possible, you patent it!!!!!!   This is the language that most of us use and understand.  It's common sense.  Patent lawyers try as best they can to eliminate common sense from their trade so as to keep the rest of us in the dark.   They want to keep the code talking to the code talkers.   We emphasize the common sense of patent law and teach the necessary "code".  Simple as that.

Back to "you can't patent an idea":

What is it that cartoonist show above guy's head who just had a great idea?  A light bulb right?   Thomas Edison's glorious invention.  Why wouldn't we make the same connection as the cartoonist.  We do, because that's the truth.  At worst, the phrase "patent an idea" is a figure of speech.  In other words while it may not be the absolute nitpicky literal truth, it's a phrase so common amongst common folk as to be completely, totally and universally understood.  How many times do lawyers use the phrase "red herring"?  Thousands of times, countless at district, appellate and certainly at the  U.S. Supreme Court also at the U.S. Congress concerning a slippery, evasive opponent.  It is never the literal truth unless their adversary has produced a smoked herring!  .  A "red herring" refers to a smoked herring laid down in a pathway to hopefully detour a pursuer during the middle ages.  Yet this phrase finds it's way in courtrooms all the time.  And that's exactly what the phrase "you can't patent an idea" is:   a red herring.  It's designed to confound, confuse and to "throw off the track" those in possession of the plainest of truths regarding patents. 

 It's possible to patent an idea that never sees any sort of physical form,... never.  A drawing, description and claim (this is the raw "idea" part of a patent) that never become a real physical thing.   This happens all the time.   Patents are a form of intellectual property, AKA "intangible assets".   Intangible the way ideas are,  right?   Right.  Because that's what a patent is:    a written description [and sometimes drawing(s)] of an idea.  Have you ever heard the phrase "Hey that's a good idea, you ought to patent it".  That's exactly what you do.  We teach you how to do it.

Another very popular intellectual property-professional lie is "you can't trademark a name".  They'll tell you "'trademark' is not a verb".  I own the same unabridged dictionary used by the CAFC (this is the U.S. patent and trademark appeals court :  Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit).  Under the word trademark I find three definitions and two of them are verbs, and one of those is the common sense-defined act of legally protecting and acquiring ownership of a product or service name.   Trademark a name.  Learn how to trademark your name.  In these classes we'll show you some simple ways to acquire common law ownership of your product or service "names":    Free! (do you see the lawyers angle now?)  Trademarks show a source for goods and services.  And with this in mind, if you have no product nor service in commerce you have no trademark.  Does that make sense?

The absurd thing is that trademark attorneys know better than anyone else the power of "the people" in altering the meaning of  words.  The word "gay" in the 1990's certainly didn't mean the same thing as it did in the "Gay Nineties" (1890's) did it?   If the "people" (meaning most of the rest of us) decide to change the meaning of a word, 20,000 patent lawyers would not even be a speed bump in the way of that juggernaut.  And again, they, more than most, know this.   Current patent professionals shouldn't delude themselves into thinking they could have any effect whatsoever on a dictionary.  Again, if they want to prevent trademark from becoming a verb they're too late.  In my dictionary the verbs outnumber the one and only noun two to one.

If a trademark becomes the only way an item of commerce is referred to, trademark rights can be lost.  At Velcro USA headquarters, everyone there says "Velcro® brand fasteners".  This is done, I'm sure, at the insistence of their trademark lawyers.   Same with "Band-Aid ® brand bandages" over at J&J.   Both of these trademarks are so common in referring to even their competitors products that these two are teetering on the brink of becoming generic.     And at that point, as with the case of Band-Aids ®,  Johnson and Johnson will not be allowed to put ® behind that product name.  Not only that, Curad will be able to call their bandages (along with the rest of us) "band-aids" and print that on their little tin boxes.   This fate befell mimeograph,  corn flakes, escalator, trampoline and others.   So anytime you see the phrase "brand ...something or other"  that is a trademark lawyer's attempt at preventing his or her client's trademark from being  "untrademarked".   There has even been a product that was trademarked, untrademarked and then retradmarked.

Well, in summary, if you want to learn this stuff, we can teach you.  The laws, the rules, everything.  The internet gives us  access to information never before imagined in this regard. 

Question:  Can the self filing independent or corporate inventor do as good a job as a patent professional in drafting, filing and prosecuting patent applications?

My answer is you damned straight!

I can give you a couple of examples.  A recent CAFC (patent court of appeals) case tells us this.  A certain John Kollar received a final rejection by an examiner at the USPTO.  He appealed this rejection to the BAPI (Board of Appeals and Patent Interference) within the patent office and the rejection stood.  He appealed this decision to the U.S. Court system, namely the CAFC, and guess what?  He presented his case and won.  All sans lawyer.

I like to say that patent lawyers are like doctors.  They get to bury their mistakes, often under tons of prolixic (excessive wordiness) obfuscation (vague and confusing) .  Patents often contain mistakes (about a third of the ones I read).  You'll see.  We'll point them out to you.  A great many of these errors are clerical.  Some are tactical.  Some are strategic.  Some involve patent claims and ruin the inventors day.  But again most are clerical, typo's that sort of thing.

And so a great many of these patent professional mistakes are inconsequential and small, occasionally they are huge and in plain site.  A rotting fetid corpse, sprawled out in the noon day sun.

I recently received a 102(e) rejection based on a huge exposed mistake regarding a patent drawing.  The drawing in question was a flow chart.  Flow charts tell what a device does and when it does it.  Flow charts are shorthand for computer software.  For example one might read: 

    Has contact been made by door bell buzzer switch?

                    ↓

                 Yes

                 ↓

 Energize door buzzer.  

Believe it or not a great many flow charts don't get much more complicated than this.  Patents are written for Judges and Juries or at least they're supposed to be.

A flow chart like this would be used if the door bell was controlled by a micro computer.  Got it?

And so my rejection was based on a prior patent application (and ultimately a patent) who's filing date preceded mine, hence the rejection (102 e).  The patent in question had only two patent drawings (!) and one was a flow chart.  Something didn't look right.  The patent was very wordy (prolixic) and vague.  The flow chart didn't make sense.  I ultimately found 7 huge mistakes in the flow chart.  Glaring.  Humongous.  Massive.  Unbelievable.  These mistakes weren't for "this" as "the", they were for action words like energize, the ones that count, the ones that describe the action taken by the micro processor or the conditions necessary for the micro process to act, like with the door buzzer above.  It was this flow chart that caused me grief.  This patent application was from a German based corporation and was handled by a U.S. patent attorney, it was under the careful watch of the patent examiner and approved by another.  It was read by my examiner.  These folks were trained to do this stuff.  I have trained myself.  I found these errors when they didn't.  (I'll show them to you.)

But why didn't they find them?   Simple.  Not enough motivation.  These folks are punching a clock in order to get a check.  I'm writing a check.  Big difference.  Plus my patent hangs in the balance.  I was told that because of this German patent I don't get mine.  I wanted to see how this sketchy, noodling, vague document taught my invention, and as it turned out, it didn't.  What if I had hired out my patent work to a lawyer?  Would he have found these mistakes?   Maybe, but maybe not.

One of my Inventions:   The Texas Microwave (tm, sm) U.S. Patent Pending:

Listen to The Ballad of The Texas Microwave  © 1998 William Y. Guess

Bill Guess, www.patentlessons.com instructor and member in good standing:    the pro se posse.

© Devinet Inc. 2003