3.2 #2. Utility
Protecting Business Innovations via Patent
Universidade de Ciência e Tecnologia de Hong Kong
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Protecting Business Innovations via Patent Watch Course Overview: https://youtu.be/mUja4iwbrTE This course assumes no prior knowledge in law, business or engineering. However, students with backgrounds in all three areas will find useful concepts or ideas in the course on how to protect business innovations using patents. The approach taken in this course is practical and commercial rather than theoretical. A combination of lectures and case studies help to illustrate the concepts and make the course more interesting. After completing this course, students should be able to understand how patents are issued and protect innovations, including: What is a patent? What do they protect? How do we get a patent? Where are patents valid? How much do they cost? In addition to basic concepts the course also deals with advanced topics such as: software patents, business process patents, patenting life, patent trolls and multiple case examples of large and small companies using patents and patent lawsuits. We also expect you to have fun in this course. So go forth and enjoy!
Course was well design, will helps the learner to get good exposure.\n\nEveryone, want to work in this area need to attend this course.
This course is made easy and very practical. The Instructor is excellent. I will suggest you take it.
UTILITY PATENT REQUIREMENTS
We get down to the details on what is needed to submit a formal patent application including providing evidence regarding novelty, utility and non-obviousness. Let's dig in to the main meal.
3.1 #1. Novelty7:41
3.2 #2. Utility10:04
3.3 #3. Non-Obviousness7:58
3.4 Demonstrating non-obviousness8:55
3.5 Non-obviousness cases: PBJ & Bathroom Brush9:59
Theodore Henry King CLARK
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Welcome back to our course on Protecting Business Innovations via Patents.
We're going to talk about the second of our three requirements to get a patent
today, utility.
You might have already thought novelty, the first one, that's pretty easy.
Utility is even easier.
So that's great news.
The bad news is number three is a killer.
But utility's important.
Now what is utility?
Utility is why is it useful?
And the patents we're talking about are called utility patents.
That's what most people mean when they say I got a patent.
I got a utility patent.
It's not the only kind of patent, but it is the most useful kind of patent.
It's the most money that you can make from having a patent.
It's the best protection of a patent, and it's a patent that requires usefulness.
And when we look at utility, the requirement is pretty easy.
But, the patent office does say, you must state
clearly some way in which your product or process is useful and an application.
You have to be clear and have to state how is it useful.
Now if you state a utility, if you say why this is useful,
the burden then shifts to the government,
to the Patent Trademark Office for them to show that it's not useful.
You may say this particular invention is useful, and they may then say no it's not.
But then they have to support why they view it's not useful.
Maybe they say your invention is really not what you say, or
it really doesn't help in the way that you said.
Or you may say your utility is not important, or not valuable to society,
but it shifts the burden to the government to argue against your utility.
But if you don't state a utility that is grounds for
immediate dismissal of your patent.
No utility, no patent.
You must state it.
It may sound trivial, of course it's useful, it's a utility patent.
But then you must state why it's useful.
Now the good news is the utility that you state in your patent
application doesn't need to be the only useful application.
So, for example, drugs are often patented for one use and used for another.
For example, you may get a patent on a drug,
a chemical formulation, that helps to cure a rare form of cancer.
You say, well, that's useful because people who had this cancer without
this drug may die, and with this drug may live.
It increases their life expectancy.
That's useful.
It turns out, as you're doing tests, and you're doing therapeutic trials, and
over the next couple of years in getting licensed and using it out in the field.
It turns out that people not only recover from their cancer, but
they start to grow hair on their head.
And it turns out that this drug can help cure a rare form of cancer and baldness.
Well, curing baldness is worth a lot more money
than curing cancer, especially a rare cancer.
I mean you might be able to charge a lot, but the 500 patients you get for
this cancer disease are nothing compared to the 5 million customers you may
have for a baldness medication.
And they may take it for a lot longer.
And if it doesn't have bad side effects, you may find doctors prescribing it, or
people using it for curing baldness.
That's okay, you still have a monopoly on that chemical formulation.
You got the drug patented.
It doesn't matter that the application you're using it for
is not at all the one the you applied for in your patent.
All you have to do to get a patent is state some useful application.
If there are other applications that are useful, that's great.
That's an extra benefit to you.
Now this doesn't work as well for
a process patent like the process of making synthetic rubber.
And you discover that same process could work for making synthetic clay.
Well that's a different process.
And so you can't extrapolate processes as well as you can products.
But a product, which is a chemical formulation or specific device,
if you could get a patent on that, that can easily be used in another application.
And so that's kind of a nice thing
as you can use your patent in many different ways.
All you have to have is one utility that you state clearly in your application.
One of the best ways to show utility,
to demonstrate utility is to have sales.
If it has a lot of sales, it would seem like it
must be useful at least to someone, to some people.
If sales grow fast, that's evidence of utility but it's not proof.
The government can still say you have committed fraud.
You have told consumers that this pill will make them lose weight.
It turns out your pill is nothing but fiber, and yes fiber
is a way of losing weight but there's no real substantive invention here.
Not only is there nothing new but there's no utility or
maybe you did come up with a new process for a new type of fiber.
Something that is novel.
Maybe it's even non-obviousness.
But then you come back and say, there's no real gain here.
There's nothing useful or there's not much utility here to this.
Mostly you're just selling people on something that doesn't really help them.
And they believe you because you had a famous actor do the sales pitch.
So the good news is sales really do help show utility.
The good news is you just have to state the utility and
the government has to then fight it.
But there may be cases where the government says,
your patent medicine really is a fake medicine.
It's just got a lot of alcohol in it and that makes people feel happy, and
that's not really curing them.
In general, one of the issues about utility and showing it
with sales is that you kind of want to make sure to watch out for novelty.
So that it's better to file the application and
then start commercial sales.
You still get to show that utility via sales because it'll probably take three
years to get your application approved.
So you still have time.
But you probably want to file and then start sales or
at least file soon after starting sales.
It also must have your use must be useful to society.
If you look kinetic balls that bounce against each other when you hold one
ball up and then it bounces one off the other side and they bounce back and forth.
And you say, is it useful?
Well it may be a therapeutic device, it may be its useful for stress reduction.
And it turns out you can make a case why it's useful.
kind of looks like a novel toy, but it may be useful to some individuals.
And so many patents that you might think are kind of toys
have been issued when you come up with some form of utility.
But there was a nice chemical product developed in a research lab that
was denied patent because the chemist involved at the university said
this is going to be useful in so many ways, we just can't elaborate them all.
There's got to be a lot of utilities here that it could be done for,
we don't even know how it's going to be useful.
We just know that's it's a cool,
new, intermediary type solvent that's bound to have many uses.
And the Supreme Court said A, it's got to be useful to the public and
we're not sure that being useful for something or
another exploratory in a research lab is useful to the public.
And B, they said a patent is not a hunting license.
You can't just go out and get a patent and look for your utility.
You gotta state a specific utility.
So that patent was denied.
So bottom line, utility is only required for utility patents.
Because they're only granted as a matter of public policy for useful arts.
In practice, this is easy to do, but
you must clearly state why it's useful, and keep in mind,
why is it useful to the public, not useful to a researcher in a lab.
Think about the public, think about cost, or speed, or value,
or some how or another this translates over to a benefit to society.
Not just a benefit to you personally or to a research lab.