Intellectual Property Directions

You’re probably familiar with the old FRAM oil filter tag line – “you can pay me now or you can pay me [much more] later“. I say essentially the same thing to my clients when the topic of prior art searching comes up. Of course, as their Director of IP I usually am saying “We can invest in prior art searching now or pay an attorney a lot more later.”

If your invention is worth patenting, if it will add value to your company in a unique way, then by definition some competitor will want to use your invention, either by infringing (and hoping to invalidate your patent if you sue) or by asking for a re-examination to bring in new prior art that you didn’t find and/or the patent examiner didn’t consider. In either case you will spend a lot of money – orders of magnitude more money – explaining away prior art that you didn’t know existed than you would have spent finding it yourself before filing.

Karen Hazzah, in her All Things Pros blog writing about a re-examination case, makes the same point:

But non-patent literature is much more common in reexaminations, where the requester has reason to spend a lot of money on a literature search. That leaves a lot more room to argue about the “printed publication” requirement. And since an in-force patent is at stake, it’s not surprising that the patentee digs really deep with its arguments, bringing up facts like [the lack of] ISBN numbers and sales receipts.

In the particular re-examination, the “requester” (viz., competitor) found prior art in a college professor’s self-published, loose leaf, “textbook” that he had used in his teaching. He had distributed it to about 600 pupils over the years and mentioned it in publications. He sold copies to anyone who asked, based on seeing those publications.

The patentee grasped at straws, arguing that this prior art wasn’t a “printed publication” within the meaning of the law because of its informal nature and distribution channel . But nothing in the law says prior art has to be produced by a traditional book or magazine publisher or be bound in any particular fashion; nothing in the law says you have to be able to get it on Amazon.

The spirit of the law only requires that a document has been disseminated or otherwise made available – to the extent that someone interested and ordinarily skilled in the subject matter, can, with reasonable effort, “locate it and recognize and comprehend therefrom the essentials of the claimed invention without need of further research or experimentation.” In other words, a document is prior art if an interested party can reasonably get their hands on it.

This “textbook” is an extreme case, to be sure. What are the chances that you could find a similar, privately produced “textbook” that described your invention, given the 4000 colleges in the United States and the tens or hundreds of thousands of professors who have taught there? But as this case shows, if someone wants to invalidate your patent, they will spend the money to find the prior art.

If at all possible, you should pay for a prior art search… or you can pay me later!

I’m not much of a seamstress, so I can’t testify to how many stitches are saved by repairing a tear as soon as it happens, but I do know that investing in a prior art search can easily save you from wasting ten or more times as much on an application for an un-patentable invention. And the ROI can be much much greater if prior art search saves you from infringing someone’s broad but not widely known patent.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had essentially identical discussions with two clients. In both cases my clients had the foresight (okay, at my urging) to have me do a prior art search to see what was out there BEFORE we started pulling together patent disclosure to send to the patent attorney. In both cases I discovered some prior art that would have made getting a patent difficult at best and, if allowed, would have been quite limited in scope. In both cases we concluded that the business value of such a limited patent, three of four years from now, did not justify the investment today.

 When should you initiate a prior art search? The different circumstances of my two clients may help you make that decision. One client – Client “X” – recognized a need in the marketplace, identified a solution and was hoping to develop a product to meet that need. He asked me to take a quick look at the patent prior art, since he wanted to feel comfortable that he had the freedom to build the type of device he imagined, and a second, deeper look to see if there was prior art of any sort that would limit his ability to obtain a reasonably broad patent to protect his market. The good news/bad news is that I found a recently published patent application that disclosed most, if not all, of what he wanted to do. Whether or not that application ever turns into a patent, its prior publication meant that my client would not be able to get a patent to protect his device and he dropped the project (and the patent work for me!). Bad news: no product and no patent; good news: saving the cost of filing a patent application that would probably never give him a return on investment.

The second client – Client “Y” – had already developed a novel image processing approach as an off-shoot of his main business thrust. He wanted to get a patent on the invention to increase its potential licensing value, since he does not need the invention in his core business. Again, as a preliminary step to preparing a patent disclosure, I did a prior art search, extending the search beyond the areas for which Client “Y” had developed the technology. Again the good news/bad news is that I uncovered a large collection of academic papers that disclosed perhaps 95% of my client’s approach. Together we decided that, at best, we might be able to get a narrow patent covering that last 5%; that competitors could probably work around that 5% anyway; and that it would be a long and painful fight with the examiner to surmount the certain-to-come obviousness objection. And of course we would not know if the patent would issue for 3 years or more. And the whole of the invention would be made public. So we decided that he would be better off pursuing license agreements based on keeping his approach as a trade secret. At least he saved the cost of trying to obtain the patent.

So are you like these clients – willing and wanting to invest in a prior art search to save an order of magnitude more money if the patent would not make sense? Or are you doing so well that you’ll throw money down the drain?