Re: patent cost

Subject: Re: Re: patent cost

Comments:
: If the company you're working with is a patent mill advertising to the general public, chances are that you're being taken to the cleaners. It's not necessarily true, but I hear virtual no happy customer testimonials from such organizations. : My direct answer to your question is pretty much the answer to all questions in intellectual property: it depends. : $26,000 to "patent" your invention? or to file your application for patent? How many countries? Which countries? To register your trademark? or to simply file an application for registration of your trademark? How many trademarks? How many classes of goods? : U.S. Patents : ============ : I've charged as little as $700 and as much as over $100,000 for filing patent applications. Of course, everybody wants the $700 job, but it's dictated by the complexity of the invention. The $700 one was for a dog toy box with two moving parts. The $100,000 was for a object-oriented, distributed operating system (really ought to have been many separate applications but that decision wasn't mine to make -- the application was over 700 pages long). : In the Silicon Valley, the average patent application is around $20,000-30,000. My Silicon Valley patent applications average about half that amount. : To actually get the patent (years after filing), it's not at all unreasonable to spend $25,000 for the U.S. only. Again, this depends largely on the complexity of your invention. : Foreign Patents : =============== : To file a patent application outside the U.S., you can budget approximately $5,000 per country. : I suspect your quote ($26,000) doesn't cover that. I suspect it covers filing an application under the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty). You can think of that as merely preserving your rights to file in most of the industrialized world, but not as a true patent application which, in and of itself, can become a patent. You should still budget $5,000 per country per patent application, but the PCT will let you postpone the time for doing that somewhat. And, it doesn't preserve your rights indefinitely -- only 20 or 30 months. : Trademarks : ========== : Preparing and filing a trademark application is trivial (takes me about 10 minutes -- after about 10 minutes of thinking about the description of goods and services). It's very difficult to make a living doing only trademark work unless you do "value billing" rather than time billing. : The problem with trademark applications is that they can get really messy -- especially if someone files an opposition to your application. That becomes like a mini litigation and $26,000 can be eaten up rather quickly. I doubt your quote includes anything other than filing the application for trademark given how quickly costs can rise depending on what happens to the application. : Lastly, yes, you can do it yourself. While it may sound self-serving, I really recommend that you work with an intellectual property professional whom you trust. If you don't think it's worth it to talk to a professional, you probably won't be able to extract value from you patent(s) once you have it/them. : That's a rather rough and over-simplistic answer to your question. I hope it helps. : Regards. : : : I am working with a company to patent my invention and now I am down to being able to patent the product but to patent it as us and foriegn and trademark they want 26000 dollars! is that out of line. is it that difficult to do it yourself?

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