patents

You may license your patent exclusively or to more than one party. Non-exclusive rights allow many entities, including you, to practice the invention simultaneously.

 "Take my word for it". In the world of patent law, this adage holds little weight.

Patent law is highly complex, and drafting patents is among the most difficult of all legal writing.

"Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent." - Thomas Edison

A patent search is a subset of the prior art search in which you look for mention of similar ideas in academic and technical literature, etc.

To be patented, your invention not only must fall within one of the three statutory classes, it also must fulfill three other requirements:

Novelty:

Patents are products of the legal system. As such, they apply only to inventions, and then only if the invention falls within legally defined categories.

To encourage the creation of valuable ideas, and protect them from being stolen, the U.S. legal system developed the concept of intellectual property.

Patent offices may define a number of types of applications, each offering different benefits and being useful in different situations.

Depending upon the office at which a patent application is filed, that application could either be an application for a patent in a given country, or may be an application for a patent in a range o