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Home / Intellectual Property / Utility Pat. Search You can patent just about anything. The question is, will that patent be worth anything to you? Is it going to be worth the money you put into the patenting process (which is often quite costly)? What determines a patents worth is the patents ability to protect something you created. The broader the patent, the more it protects. So when thinking about patenting you must weigh the worth of your patent. What the patent examiner does when looking at your patent application is look for previous patents that describe yours. So, if you make your description (Claims) very narrow, so that they describe every detail, you will most likely be able to get a patent. But then the Patent won't be worth anything because all somebody has to do is change a little detail and it is no longer described by your patent. How do you determine if your invention is patentable? Do what the PTO (Patent & Tradmark Office) does. The PTO has placed every invention ever patented within a complicated heirarchy of "classes" and "subclasses." You have to figure out what category or categories your invention falls under. I believe my patent would be under the class 273 (Board Games), subclass 236 (Board Game, Pieces, or Boards thereof), subclass 285 (...rolls, folds or otherwise collapses), subclass 286 (surface having pattern, made of flexible material). Once you have a number of classes that your invention may fall into, you look them up in the database (I did it at the Umass Graduate Research Center), and print out pages upon pages of numbers. The numbers are all patent numbers of existing patents which may be similar to yours. Now, you can either painstakingly look them up in the vaults, or ten-key them into the US Patent & Trademark Office Patent Website. We search through the USPTO.gov website trying to find an invention that conflicts with our own. Part of the patent application is describing the "prior art," similar inventions from which yours differs. My observation from this part of my search is that all the patents in this class are very narrow. They describe specifically the board, peices, and even methods of play. A patent this narrow does not sound worth the time and money to me at this point. So we have to look at more recent stuff, knowing that the highly specialized patent examiner is going too as well. This is where my utility patent search ended. While looking online I found a game (Harry Potter Casting Stones) that is circular, ties up into a pouch, and even uses some of the same peices (glass beads) that my game does. It is not due out in stores until November 16th, but it would be considered prior art by the time I filed my appliciation I had reached the crossroads of my patent search. Did I want to move farther on it, or give it up? My mechanism for the game becoming a pouch _is_ different from "Casting Stones". But it is not very different from various patents I found in my search, each of which had a very narrow description, meaning that their prior art must have included a game with a similar mechanism. Or it could also mean that the idea is simply not innovative enough in the first place for a patent at all. Which brings me to the question, what is innovative about my game? From the beginning, through version upon version, the one thing that has remained constant and unique is the design of the Dragon Duel board. I have filed a copyright for that, and will now begin researching the possibility of a Design Patent, asking first the question, "what protection will a Design Patent grant me that is not covered by my Copyright?" |
