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By: Ikedi Ani-okoye.

Patent introduction

It is very common to confuse patents with copyrights and trademarks. A patent basically grants the inventor trademark rights for his invention. The words of the actual patent grant are as follows: "the inventor is given the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention in the issuing country or importing the invention into that country." In other words, the inventor has complete control over his invention.

Patent types

There are 3 kinds of patents that an inventor can obtain. The first is a utility patent, which is given to anyone who invents of discovers a new process or machine. This includes any article manufactured that is an improvement over a similar article. The second is a design patent, which is given to anyone who invents a new design for a manufactured article. The third patent is called a plant patent, which is given to anyone who invents a new kind of plant.

Chemical patents

Sometimes too many synonyms for a particular terminology (more frequent in chemical compound names) creates problem in keyword searching. Another major drawback in searching chemical patents using keywords is the use of generic terms instead of specific names. Many times the title and abstract of the patents does not properly describe the invention which leads to missing of important patents in keyword based searches.

To overcome this problem, customized database vendors such as Derwent creates their own title and abstracts and indexed them for better patent searching using keywords. Another problem of keyword based search is the date limitations of databases. These databases indexed the translated data of patents from a particular date. In such situations complete prior-art search can not be conducted.

CONCLUSION

Not recommended for the faint of heart, some inventors choose to write the patent themselves. Views differ between inventors and attorneys as to whether this is a good practice. I'm just letting you know the option is out there. The trick with any patent is to make it broad enough to hinder competition, but specific enough to pass through the examiner. Don't be discouraged if your application gets rejected the first time (this happens to everyone), just revise and re-file.