have maintained a monopoly on the drink’s taste for decades. Surely, many competitors have managed to come close enough to that taste, but it has been impossible to replicate the exact formula. This would have been very easy if the formula had been disclosed in a patent application. What if one doesn’t care about patents? The truth is that anyone engaged in commercial activities should be patent aware. Selling, offering for sale, using, producing Alexandros Lioumbis European Patent Attorney, ZBM Patents & Trademarks or importing a product protected by a patent in a relevant territory and without having a license to do so amounts to no less than an offense punishable by law. An infringer may have to pay damages, may be forced out of a market and, in extreme cases of intentional infringement, may face even imprisonment. On the positive side, modern companies should develop a patent strategy for their own benefit. They need to establish information flow that assures that any ideas coming from employees and that are relevant to their business are properly acknowledged and evaluated for their patentable merit. They need to have internal protocols for recognizing what, where, when and how to patent and what needs to be kept a secret. Furthermore, they need to monitor the patenting activity of the competition to make sure their products do not infringe upon competitors’ patents. They should have a clear patent strategy and be open for licenses and agreements. A good patenting strategy is like money in the bank. Companies that had to leave the market but had a sound patent portfolio could still generate revenue for shareholders by the mere licensing or transfer of patents. Motorola, for example, was forced out of the market, having suffered huge losses in the last years of its market life. However, a powerful patent portfolio allowed the company to be sold for billions to Google. Even while in the market, a sound patent portfolio can be a marketing tool, leverage for raising capital or even a way to increase the value of the company and its capitalization in the market. Conversely, a poor patenting strategy could achieve exactly the opposite. It could be a way to lose money if there are no proper patent background searches executed and the company engages in infringing activities, if money is spent on inventions with no commercial value, if patents are unnecessarily kept alive in territories with low enforcement possibilities or if patents are drafted too narrowly and can be easily bypassed by competitors. Patents are an honorable agreement between the inventor and society. They are an established way of passing the knowledge of innovators on to the public while offering a time-limited monopoly incentive to the innovative mind. Nevertheless, as with all things in life, it should be handled by professionals in a professional way. As a person would trust their health to health professionals, so should inventors trust their inventions to patent professionals. If you decide that a patent strategy is what your firm needs, make an appointment with a patent attorney for the health of your company. Spray February 2015 Spray 21 the legitimate patents for these improvements. Nevertheless, it would not have been possible for any of them to commercialize any of these products as they would still infringe upon the first patent. In such a case, the proprietor of the subsequent patent would need to come to some sort of an agreement with Rotheim, the owner of the first patent, so that they could both benefit from their ideas. However, after the expiration of the patent term, anyone would be free to use the technology. Patent requirements What does it take to have a patent granted for an invention? It must comply with what are broadly referred to as “patentability requirements.” These may be summarized in three terms: novelty, inventive step and industrial applicability. To meet the requirement of novelty, an invention is compared with the prior art. The prior art includes everything made available to the public anywhere in the world by means of a written or oral description, by use, or in any other way, before the date of filing of the patent application. It should be noted that a public disclosure of the invention before the filing of the patent application constitutes prior art and can ruin the novelty of the same invention. The second requirement, inventive step, requires that the invention not be obvious to a skilled person. To pass the obstacle of inventive step, a skilled person should not be able to come up with the same solution if provided with the relevant prior art. Finally, an invention must be industrially applicable, meaning that it should, for example, not violate any laws of physics. Perpetual motion configurations without energy loss, time travel machines and apparatuses for communicating with the deceased are typical examples of inventions lacking industrial applicability. One might ask why patent document language appears so different from a real product description. This is because sometimes a patent is drafted before an actual product is finalized. On the one hand, a patent attorney needs to provide a thorough description so as to make the patent sufficiently disclosed, something that would enable a skilled person to reproduce the idea. On the other hand, the scope of protection has to be defined by the claims that need to be neither too broad, because this could affect the novelty of the invention, nor too narrow, as this would undermine the protection of the idea. As a consequence, a patent attorney, with the help of the inventor, needs to stretch the invention to its limits, even beyond what the inventor originally had in mind, so that the idea covers many alternative implementations, many areas of practice and, hopefully, for the sake of the inventor’s pocket, as many commercial products as possible. Should I patent it? Is every invention up for a patent? The short answer is no. To qualify for a patent an invention needs to have not been disclosed. Only the U.S. and a few other territories have some limited exceptions to this rule. One reason for not filing for a patent is that no commercial advantage is anticipated or no strategic purpose is served. Another reason may be that the invention can easily be kept a secret. If an invention is considered impossible to reverse engineer or analyze, then it is best to be kept a secret. Imagine if the chemical formula of Coca Cola was patented. It would have expired decades ago and anyone would have been able to reproduce it. By keeping the formula a secret, the owners of the Coca Cola brand
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