February 2, 2007

Equal Time

Today I am an official inventor.

On Jan. 30 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued my very first patent.

It’s not completely mine. My husband, Mike, and I are listed as the co-inventors of U.S. Patent No. 7,171,174, Multiple Radio Signal Processing and Storing Method and Apparatus.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Solar Operations and Maintenance for Commercial Properties

One key qualification to consider when selecting a solar partner to install your system is whether they have an Operations and Maintenance (O&M) or service department. Since solar is a long-term asset with an expected lifecycle of 30 plus years, ongoing O&M should be considered up front. A trusted O&M partner will maximize your system’s energy output and therefor the return on your investment.

He’s not quite as excited as I am, because he already has close to 50 patents.

But, all of his other patents really belong to his employer, so this is a first for him, too.

Despite the fancy-schmancy title, which the patent office came up with, not us, 174 (patent geeks refer to patents by the last three numbers, according to Mike) is really a simple idea that I came up with about five years ago.

Yes, it’s taken five years for the patent to issue.

One day we were driving someplace and the announcer said something about some event somewhere some time or another, and I missed the details of what he was saying.

“Man, I wish I could replay that,” I said. “Why doesn’t somebody invent something that could do that?”

A single light bulb went off above our heads, and as soon as we got home we wrote up a provisional patent application describing the features and a basic idea of how it would work.

We were on a roll back then; this was our second great idea within a few months that we thought was patentable, and we filed the provisionals the same day.

Unfortunately, the patent pending on the other great idea still is languishing at the patent office with no end in sight.

Provisional patent applications give you a year to file an official patent app. If you don’t follow up, the patent office tosses the provisional. The reason to file a provisional is to save your filing date. That is important in case your patent is challenged, and you need to establish you were the first inventor.

During the year that followed we wrote our patents. Ourselves. Since Mike has written most of his nearly 50 patents, and I’m, well, a writer, we figured we could do it without the help of a patent lawyer. Not only did it really make us think about what our inventions would do and how they would do it, it saved us tons of money.

We collaborated on the disclosures – the part that describes the invention so someone “skilled in the art” can build it.

I drew all the drawings using Visio, and Mike wrote all the claims using his expertise.

I found that nothing offends a professional writer more than the arcane lingo of patent claims. Some more shocking phrases include: “What is claimed is” and “… selected from the group consisting of … .”

We decided to file internationally first. That’s because typically you get a quicker response on a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application than a U.S. one.

That’s when we hired a lawyer – to walk us through that convoluted process.

A PCT filing doesn’t result in a patent, however. What happens is someone in one of the PCT’s member states reads and evaluates your application and conducts an international search for similar intellectual property.

The report you get back can come in handy when applying in the U.S., because a favorable one shows the patent examiner that someone in the world takes your idea seriously.

In theory.

In reality, it took so long to get a response that we filed in the U.S. without waiting for the return mail.

It turned out to not make much of a difference anyway, especially for our languishing patent.

The worst part of filing patents is patent examiner hell. It’s luck of the draw who examines your patent, and many examiners are non-English speakers, making communication challenging.

For 174 we fared a little better than our unnamed patent. The examiner didn’t have too much of an accent, reported Mike, who had more than one conference call with the examiner and our high-priced New York patent lawyer.

We hired the high-priced New York lawyer when our first lawyer, a local, turned out not to have the right stuff.

The paperwork involved in prosecuting a patent costs money. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the legal aid.

While Mike and I saved money writing our own applications, the negotiation process with the patent examiner really gets the meter ka-chinging.

Nothing can be decided in a phone conversation, either. The examiner makes suggestions, your attorney files a response (and you pay for the paperwork and his time), the examiner responds to that, ad infinitum.

My conscience prevents me from thinking of all the good works we could have done with that money besides risk it protecting our intellectual property. Suffice it to say, we’ve had to postpone retirement by a few years.

But today I think it’s worth it.

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at 303-440-4950 or csellis@bcbr.com.

Today I am an official inventor.

On Jan. 30 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued my very first patent.

It’s not completely mine. My husband, Mike, and I are listed as the co-inventors of U.S. Patent No. 7,171,174, Multiple Radio Signal Processing and Storing Method and Apparatus.

He’s not quite as excited as I am, because he already has close to 50 patents.

But, all of his other patents really belong to his employer, so this is a first for him, too.

Despite the fancy-schmancy title, which the patent office came up with, not us, 174 (patent geeks refer to patents by the…

Christopher Wood
Christopher Wood is editor and publisher of BizWest, a regional business journal covering Boulder, Broomfield, Larimer and Weld counties. Wood co-founded the Northern Colorado Business Report in 1995 and served as publisher of the Boulder County Business Report until the two publications were merged to form BizWest in 2014. From 1990 to 1995, Wood served as reporter and managing editor of the Denver Business Journal. He is a Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder. He has won numerous awards from the Colorado Press Association, Society of Professional Journalists and the Alliance of Area Business Publishers.
Sign up for BizWest Daily Alerts