Each year, entrepreneurs introduce in to the market countless new consumer-oriented products. These items focus on a number of personal activities: cooking, personal care, sports, gardening, cleaning, etc. Usually, consumer merchandise is mass-created and offered at an inexpensive, say under $ 50. Therefore, from necessity, they utilize designs that provide low-cost manufacturing: i.e., they’re made up of only a number of simple to set up parts. Regrettably, a minimal-cost product design is susceptible to being ‘knocked off’ by so-known as copycat competitors.
To combat ‘copycats,’ makers of consumer products sometimes seek patent protection for his or her product designs. However, protecting someone product having a patent could be tricky.
To begin with, to acquire patent protection, a cutting-edge consumer product needs to be not the same as all prior products and in addition it needs to be different inside a significant way. In “patentese,” the main difference needs to be “non-apparent.” A couple of consumer goods are ‘game changers.’ These rare innovations have a tendency to sail with the patent office with relative ease since they’re the very first of the kind or significantly not the same as all past designs. However, the typical situation is the fact that a cutting-edge consumer method is an incremental improvement over or perhaps a variation of previous product designs. Showing towards the patent office that this type of product design is inventive can be tough.
One established way of making the situation that the innovation needs a patent involves highlighting the important thing technical variations from a new design and prior designs. This is when obstacles arise. There are just a lot of methods to develop a mousetrap. So it is no wonder the ‘latest and greatest’ mousetrap uses areas of a classic mousetrap. Quite frequently, the characteristics which are similar from a new design as well as an old design will outnumber the characteristics which are different. In such cases, the real innovation inside a design is almost always tucked within merely a single part or perhaps a mere number of parts. More precisely, the innovation is based on how individuals parts enable an item design to operate better in certain aspect.
It ought to be apparent, therefore, that writing a patent application that just describes the way a product looks could be insufficient. That’s, simply developing a “parts list” and describing the types of materials, dimensions, shapes, etc. of every part might not fully express the significant design variations vis-à-vis prior designs. The patent application must go further and furnish the facts regarding the way the critical parts act or interact to supply a benefit that didn’t formerly exist. Neglecting to adequately describe such actions or interactions could make it even more hard to convince the patent office that the innovation merits patent protection.
At this time, it’s important to note that most consumer products available on the market aren’t patent protected. Oftentimes, branding and proper prices might be sufficient for any product to create sales while discouraging copycat competitors. In some cases, someone product could have a market existence of just 3 to 5 years. Since it might take 3 or more years for any patent to allow, patent protection for brief market existence products makes little sense. So that as many inventors have discovered, getting a patent grant doesn’t guarantee commercial success. Therefore, inventors should remain receptive to business models that don’t depend on the presence of patent protection for commercial success.
