Intellectual Property Directions

Technical Editor Paul Rako of EDN (formerly Electronics Design News) recently posted a blog entitled File Your Own Patents. It’s really more of a meta-post since it is only announcing an upcoming article. It starts:

My IC designer buddy Don Sauer already has something like 40 patents, mostly when he worked at National Semiconductor. Now he is working up an article for me on how to do it cheap.

Mr. Sauer’s how-to solution, apparently, is to skip the patent attorney and file it yourself. To that I say, well, hogwash. Actually, what I said in a comment to the blog was:

I will grant you that a reasonably intelligent person can certainly file a patent application pro se; anyone who can read with comprehension can do most knowledge work. However, the suggestion that one should file pro se begs two questions; are you ready (and interested enough) to invest the time to become knowledgeable in patent law and procedure to do it as well as an attorney or patent agent AND how are you accounting for the opportunity cost of the time spent (both the learning time, which can be amortized over many patents but which is an on-going investment as the law/rules change, and the time prosecuting the patent).

If the answer to the first question is NO, then we all know about GIGO. And if the answer to the second question is “Duh” or “I do it on my own time” then I suggest you haven’t thought this through.

After being a senior R&D engineer for 25 years I decided I was interested enough in IP and now have my own company acting as a part-time, outsourced Director of Intellectual Property. Most of my clients would prefer to spend their time (and their subordinates’ time) working on the invention itself and to hire someone - myself, a patent agent, or, heaven forbid, an attorney - to translate the engineering into a patent application. I would suggest this route is more cost effective for a company than to divert engineering talent to a task for which they are not trained.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Obviousness, Patent Prosecution, Patent Quality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.