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PTO fees È
Protecting your invention with a U.S. patent is not cheap,
nor should it be. If your invention has significant value, then you
should expect to pay a price for establishing your legal rights to
it. Besides, a U.S. patent doesn't just protect your invention,
it adds value to your invention -- in fact, it is the primary source of
value. A good analogy is your house. Try to sell your house without
a title. A buyer would be a fool to give you $300,000 for your house
if you don't have a clear title -- and if they're smart, they would want a
land-survey and various inspections to be sure the property is what you say it is.
Similarly, not many people are foolish enough to give you hundreds of
thousands or millions of dollars for your invention unless it is
properly protected and recorded in the Patent Office. In fact, most
large companies won't even talk to you about your invention until you have
applied for a patent.
There are four major types of costs incurred in obtaining a patent.
1) The patent search; 2) the drawings; 3) drafting the application; and 4)
the filing fees and other PTO charges. Each of these are discussed
below. Here is a useful table of links to pages that provide some
numbers.
1) A patent search will cost you from $300 to $1000 or more,
depending on how complex your invention is and how comprehensive the
search is. In my Q&A on patents, I discuss some strategies for
patent searches and searching.
2) In almost every case your application must include drawings of
your invention. With the proliferation of computer assisted design
software, professionals who do patent drawings are easy to find.
Most of them will charge you around $50 for each drawing. Ten
drawings in an application would probably be more than most, but you can
probably expect to have at least 5. If you want to, you can defer
this cost until after the application is approved. You can submit
rough drawings initially, as long as they are clear enough that they don't
slow down the examiner too much.
3) Paying someone to draft and prosecute your application is the
largest initial expense. Patent professionals will generally charge from
$4,500 on the low end of the
scale to $10,000 on the high end to draft an RPA. Yes, there is a very wide range of costs in this field.
Patent professionals' fees can be difficult to compare because they include different
things. Some firms charge by the hour, and the sky is often the
limit. Some firms charge a flat fee that covers only drafting
the application, but not the time involved in negotiating with the Patent
Office after the application is filed. If this time is charged by
the hour, fees can mount up very quickly. Another cost that is
sometimes hidden is the cost of producing the
drawings. Also, some firms charge an extra fee just to assemble the
application papers and to put them in the mail. When you seek quotes for the cost of filing and
prosecuting a patent application, be certain you know what is, and what is
not, included. Any quote should be in writing and should include
that information.
4) Then there are the fees that the Patent Office
charges. I refer to these as "fixed-fees" even though they
change from year to year. There are two fee-structures. The
heavy hitters, like IBM, Microsoft, and HP, pay twice as much as
"small-entities" -- individuals and small
businesses. A schedule of the current Patent Office
fees can be found here or at the Patent Office
web site, www.USPTO.gov.
You can buy a year's worth of what I call "patent non-protection" fairly cheaply in
the form of a Provisional Patent Application
(PPA).
The
idea of a PPA is to let the inventor easily stake a preliminary claim to
his invention for a year in order to analyze the market, get money
together, overcome design problems, etc. However, the inventor must
file a Regular Patent Application (RPA) within one year of the date
of filing the PPA or else the PPA is wasted. (The links will take
you to descriptions of PPAs & RPAs.)
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