Frequently Asked Questions

You can file a patent yourself. I can also jackhammer my cement basement floor, run new pipes through the ground, and connect my toilet. I’ve seen plumbing before. I can get a few books on plumbing and read through them. Why do I need to hire someone who’s gone to school, got licensed, and installed pipes for the past 20 years of his life?

A patent is a legal document disguised as a technical one: the protection you get is defined by claim language, and I’ve spent years training students and interns to write them. Plus, proper supporting text for the claims is needed in the patent application and you have to really know what you’re doing before creating the legal equivalent of a sewage pipe leaking your foundation then hiring someone to clean up the mess.

A half-hour video consultation is $250, and 100% of it is credited toward your project if you move forward — so if you hire us, the consultation was free. You speak directly with an attorney, not a sales team. Book at patentlawny.com/#bookAnAppointment. Initial questions about whether we're the right fit are free by phone: (973) 625-1000.

Simply put, it’s a seriousness fee. When people say to me they have to “get the money together” to pay a consultation fee, they can’t afford a patent application. Other people just want free legal advice with no intent to every compensate me for my expertise. Psychologically, if you pay for something, it’s worth more to you and get more out of it. It’s special. Therapy works better when you pay your therapist. Also, thankfully, we’re busy enough to focus our time on serious clients and we hope you’re one of them.

No — I have a good thing going here as a patent attorney and no matter how good your idea is, implementing an idea to the point of making money on it is a long process that takes a lot of work. It’s simply not worth it to me to risk my license, reputation, and ability to sleep at night to try and make money off an idea which is in your area of expertise. My area of expertise is writing patents.

Attorney-client privilege applies to your consultation even if never go further with us. This is a real difference from invention promotion companies, manufacturers, and "idea people," none of whom owe you confidentiality unless you get an NDA signed first.

Attorney/client confidentiality is something all lawyers must guard for their clients. It's a stronger requirement than an NDA, and it's part of our Engagement Agreement. No one goes to a criminal lawyer and says, "Barrister, I need your help — I just committed a crime. Can you sign an NDA first?"

Almost certainly not. Under the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999, these companies must disclose their success rates. We looked one up for a client who had used one before coming to us: 0.00% — out of more than 6,000 paying clients, not one made money. Another was 0.23%. I once read up a Popular Magazine from 1936 (available free online) and in the back, I could pick out the scam advertisements. Real licensing agents make money by taking percentages of licenses. Companies that give empty disclaimer filled half promises to bring money to you after you first pay them ten thousands of dollars means they make their money off of you. If you're considering hiring one of these companies selling you dreams, call us first and we'll happily dissuade you.

A description of your invention or brand, in whatever form exists — sketches on a napkin are genuinely fine (when legible). Product samples, models, written descriptions, slides, and other tools to teach us are also helpful depending on the type of invention. (Just don’t bring us output from questions you asked to AI – AI models what exists and does not invent until sentient and we’re not there yet.)

For trademarks: we need the exact name or logo and the goods or services it will cover. Don't wait until it's "finished"; earlier advice is cheaper advice. See our trademark filing requirements for the full list.

For design patents — which protect how your product or functional device looks — a finished version of the product is generally needed.

Yes — patent and trademark practice is federal, so we represent clients in all 50 states and internationally before the USPTO. International consultations are conducted by (secure) video. International clients: see our firm overview. У нас также есть русскоговорящий патентный поверенный (подробнее).

We work with flat fees wherever and whenever possible. No one likes surprises and no one likes fights over money. We estimate how long a job will take us, give you a flat price quote, you pay, we do the work. Done.

Honest answer: it's the going rate.

More detailed answer: writing a patent requires a very particular skill set. One has to understand the science and technology, know how to write technically, and be able to translate what an inventor is saying into the language the patent office needs to see. One has to communicate with clients, stay on top of deadlines, pass a lot of exams, and spend years training until really getting good at the job. It's a lot of work and it's not for everyone — though most patent lawyers enjoy what they do. Keeps your mind fresh.

First, let's back up — what is your reason for filing a provisional patent application? Why do you not want to file a full patent application with the job 100% complete and ready to be examined? What is the reason to do an incomplete job?

Do you want to save money? — doing a partial job costs less up front and then you still pay for the full job afterward. Now you're paying twice. Further, while you have a year from the provisional filing to file the non-provisional, we have to start writing with time to spare; waiting for the last minute isn't a good idea, so you're not gaining that much time.

In our opinion, a provisional application should be a full and complete application with everything needed … which is what we call a non-provisional patent application.

A provisional patent application is best used when you must file something within a short deadline — say, your company is about to launch a product and you're short on time. S

o: the fee depends on how much of the complete application's work goes into it.

Typically: $250 (initial consultation and preliminary search) + $750 (writing the trademark application) + $350 (government filing fee). That's for one class of goods, filing only. Adding classes — think "categories"; clothing and everything within it is one category, for example — adds fees. Full clearance searches are recommended, though few people actually carry them out.

Yes — see our Engagement Agreement. When fees are over a certain amount, we allow automated weekly payments or payment in parts. It is our policy to file documents with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office only when all fees are paid.

Yes. Most USPTO fees are reduced 60% for "small entities" (individuals, businesses under 500 employees, nonprofits) and 80% for "micro entities" (small entities that also meet income and filing-history limits). While we have some “large entity” clients, most of our clients are “small entity” and “micro entity”. We work with everyone and treat everyone equally: very well.

A US utility patent requires escalating maintenance fees with payment windows opening 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after issuance to stay in force — miss one and the patent expires. As a matter of course, with an additional petition fee, you can “revive” a patent if done within a certain amount of time from when the fee was due.

Design patents have no maintenance fees.

The rationale for the fees is … well, money. Also, if a patent isn’t worth paying for by the inventor, now it’s fair game for others to use, sooner.

A patent does not make money. A patent excludes others from carrying out the claims in your invention, though this ability to exclude others is salable or rentable to another. If you plan on carrying out your patented invention, you need your own plan to make money whether it be starting a business, increasing the value of your business, staying ahead of competitors, and/or for marketing purposes.

True story: a woman came to me with an idea for a method of taking off a sock (I'm changing facts here for confidentiality). She asked for a discount because she was a single mother with two young kids at home. Even if she got the patent, then what? She'd have a very nicely bound document from the U.S. Government with a shiny medallion on it. The chances of making money — or even proving someone infringed — were so small that I told her straight out she shouldn’t do this. I'd rather she spend the money on her kids.

Another time, someone had worked on an invention for years, hired someone, dropped it, and wanted to start again — and it became clear he had made it public more than a year earlier, which meant he could no longer patent it. I told him. He wasn't happy. Maybe he called another attorney and left that fact out, but I wasn't going to file it.

I also turn people away when ideas are clearly not patentable — one gentleman had a method of seeding a black hole with titanium to prevent worldwide devastation. Thankfully, this was during Covid and he couldn’t see my mouth aghast under the mask.

I see waves of people who want to patent whatever is trendy: apps, then apps using GPS, then cryptocurrency, then UV light to kill Covid, and now AI. You need a new and unobvious way touse the technology – an application of the technology, such as asking AI to do your dishes, usually isn’t patentable though a method of getting your kids to do the dishes (all of which are non-obvious – I mean this in jest, not legal advice) could be patentable.

Don't tell me you want a patent on a drone delivery device when those clearly already exist (and failed). Perhaps we can be clever and find some nuance that's patentable — and I'll do that for you, if that's what you want after an honest conversation about what we can protect.

That said: we're patent attorneys, not marketing professionals. We give professional opinions about what can be patented. Whether you'll make money is something you're hopefully in a better position to answer than we are.

An invention that is new, useful, and non-obvious — a machine, process, composition of matter, or an improvement of one. It isn’t enough to say “no one has done this before”. You have to be able to say, “no one has done this before and no one would think to do this up until today” … and … “I’m the first one to file it and I haven’t make this public more than a year from my filing date.” (Most other countries require no public disclosure at all before your filing date.)

Suppose I want to patent a universal translator on the end of a teddy bear’s arm. Each functions independently the way one would expect – sure, it’s new, though also would be considered “obvious”. Now, suppose whenever that universal translator causes the bear to make a never-before-made shape having some resemblance to the bear in question, combined with what the words sound like when translated to Japanese – now we may have something patentable.

More at What Is And Is Not Patentable.

Generally speaking . . .

A patent protects an invention — how something works / functions.

A trademark protects a brand — the name, logo, slogan, sound, color (rare), taste (rarer), that indicates a source – it tells customers it came from you.

A copyright protects creative expression — text, images, code, music “reduced to tangible medium” (written down, painted, etc.).

One product can involve all three: a patent on the mechanism, a trademark on the name, copyright on the packaging art and website. They're obtained separately, with different lifespans.

A utility patent lasts 20 years from its filing date, provided maintenance fees are paid. A design patent lasts 15 years from grant, no maintenance fees required. After that, the invention belongs to the public — that's the deal: disclosure and a limited monopoly in exchange for eventually enriching everyone and advancing technology to make the world a better price.

It means an application is on file — provisional or non-provisional. It grants no enforceable rights yet; you cannot sue anyone while pending. What it does is put competitors on notice that rights may issue, which deters copying, and once the application publishes you may be able to collect royalties retroactively (from publication to issuance) from infringers who had notice.

No. Protecting an invention requires a patent. Keeping records might prove the date you had an invention, but you can't stop anyone from practicing your invention without a patent — almost always. (And since the US moved to first-to-file in 2013, being able to prove you thought of it first matters even less than it used to.)

You patent an invention, which sits in between: more than a bare idea, less than a finished product. "An app that matches dog owners" might be a great idea though we have to flesh that out more. Maybe there’s a describable, specific way of accomplishing your idea which could be a patentable invention. No prototype is required — what's required is a description detailed enough that someone “of ordinary skill in the art” is enabled, from reading your patent, to carry out what is claimed in your patent.

No. The standard isn't "is it patented" — it's "is it new." Anything publicly known, sold, published, or used anywhere becomes prior art against your application, patented or not. This surprises a lot of people who've spotted an unpatented product and want to claim it. Imagine saying, “Edison’s patents on the light bulb are expired so I want to file a patent for the light bulb.” That wouldn’t work very well for society.

Yes — improvement patents are extremely common and can be valuable. Heck, there are maybe six inventions in the world and everything else as an improvement based on combining what exists.

One caveat people miss: patenting your improvement doesn't give you the right to sell it if doing so still practices the original patent's claims. You'd own the improvement; they'd own the base. Sometimes that produces a cross-license.

The sewing machine cartel in the 1800s was a particularly interesting example where five different sewing machine companies, including Singer, pooled / shared their patents with each other rather than continuing to take each other to court, and kept out other competitors.

Generally yes — an expired patent is free for anyone to practice, and expired patents are a legitimate goldmine of proven inventions. Check carefully, though: the original may have expired while later patents on improvements are still live, and the product's name and art may still be a protected trademark even when the patent is long gone.

Whoever files first. Since 2013 the US is a first-to-file system: being first to invent no longer wins. (There are some small exceptions.)

It is important to file first, though it is worth mentioning that a filing date plus or minus one or two months will not often make a difference between getting or not getting your patent.

Yes — that's the bargain at the heart of the system: disclosure in exchange for exclusivity. Patent applications normally publish 18 months after filing and issued patents are fully public. If you're filing only in the US, you can request non-publication so the application stays secret unless and until it issues. Provisional patent applications are never published though may become public if a non-provisional application is continuation thereof. If public disclosure is unacceptable even in exchange for a patent, what you want is trade-secret protection — SpaceX, for example, does this with the theory that they’ll stay 20 years ahead of the competition rather than spending money on patents.

A utility patent protects how something works; a design patent protects how a functioinal object looks. They can cover the same product at the same time. Design patents are cheaper, faster (often issuing in about a year with no office action), and stronger than most people assume — a billion-dollar Apple v. Samsung verdict rested substantially on design patents. See examples.

Anything publicly available before your filing date that has a material affect on patentabiility of your invention is “prior art” that must be disclosed to the U.S. Patent Office. “Prior art” includes earlier patents, published applications, products on sale, academic papers, YouTube videos, or a competitor's catalog from 1994. A method of making bricks with straw might be pre-empted by a prior art disclosure in the Biible.

Prior art doesn't have to be American, doesn't have to be in English, and doesn't have to be something anyone actually noticed before. Prior art is what examiners search for and what claims are written to avoid — and your own required public disclosure is made of record. Getting a patent is supposed to be collaborative – the inventor and examiner bring everything to the table and determine what can be patented together.

Start free: Google Patents and the USPTO's Patent Public Search both index the full text of US and many foreign patents. Search the words an engineer would use, not the words a marketer would — "fastening mechanism" not "amazing grip system." What you'll get is a rough answer, which is genuinely useful for killing bad ideas early. What you won't get is a professional opinion: the hard part isn't finding similar patents, it's reading their claims to see whether they actually block you.

Yes — in almost all cases. A search means you aren't filing blind: we find out what is already in the patent database and what you are likely to run into. There is no sense filing an application that is going to be rejected with no way of overcoming the rejection.

When we run a search, we find the class and subclass where your invention sits in the US patent database. Then we pull the patents that cite the ones we find, and the patents cited by the ones we find. That usually gives a pretty good picture of the state of the art for your invention.

The patent office will then run its own search, and will typically cite its own references no matter how good ours are. What our report gives you is a prediction of what is likely to happen, what the closest features are and are not in the closest references we found, and a proposed claim we can put forward in your application.

Sometimes — and rarely the recipe itself. A list of ingredients in ordinary proportions is almost always obvious. What's patentable is a genuinely novel process, an unexpected result, a shelf-life or texture breakthrough, or a new composition doing something the ingredients wouldn't suggest. This is also the classic trade-secret case: the formula stays secret forever, the patent expires in 20 years. We've patented food and agriculture inventions — see our food & agriculture patents.

The rules as such — no; rules read as abstract ideas. But games get protected all the time through the other three doors: a design patent on the board or pieces, a utility patent on novel physical components or mechanisms, a trademark on the name, and copyright on the artwork and rulebook text. Games are one of our larger categories; see toy and game patents.

Usually via design patent — protecting the specific visual appearance of a garment, shoe, or accessory. Utility patents cover functional apparel innovations (a closure, a fabric structure, a performance feature). Straight aesthetic fashion has notoriously thin US protection compared to Europe, which is exactly why design patents and trademarks carry the load here. See apparel patents.

Protection for a new variety of plant reproduced asexually — cuttings, grafts, not seeds. It's a real and narrow category (new rose cultivars, fruit tree varieties), 20 years from filing, no maintenance fees. If you've bred something new and can reproduce it clonally, this is the door.

See "How much does a provisional cost" above — our view is that a provisional done right contains everything the non-provisional would, so it's mainly a tool for deadline pressure (a launch, a disclosure you can't delay), not a way to save money. If there's no deadline forcing your hand, filing the complete application usually serves you better.

It depends — and anyone who answers with a single number is guessing. Here is what our own filings actually show.

For utility patents, the median time from filing to grant is about two years, with the middle half of cases falling between roughly one year three months and two years nine months. Design patents are quicker: a median of about one year five months.

Those two numbers should not be blended together. Which one your case resembles depends entirely on what you are protecting.

A good deal of the timeline is outside anyone's control. It turns on the individual examiner and, more than anything, on the technology area — software has a long backlog and tends to take a long time, while chemical cases generally move considerably faster.

You can buy speed. With expedited examination, an additional government fee paid at the time of filing, examination of a utility application begins in roughly four months, with the goal of having the patent in hand within a year.

Yes — Track One prioritized examination puts your application at the front of the line for an extra government fee, targeting a final disposition within about a year. There are also free options if you qualify: the patent may be expedited based on inventor age (65+) or health, among other bases. Worth discussing if timing drives your business plan.

U.S. Patent Office examiner statistics show about a 60% allowance rate. This varies by "art unit" — the office that handles your type of invention. Some examiners have 99% allowance rates and some have 0%. No joke. Most are somewhere in the middle. Those stats include everyone who filed anything that got past basic requirements; when you hire an attorney who knows what he's doing, the odds are much higher.

Which leads to the next question — "well, what are your stats?" I refer you to Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. When you start tracking and pressuring one metric, behavior changes to match the metric and ruins the bigger picture. Our stats are very good — our clients are happy.

Almost every application gets rejected at least once — a first office action is a normal step, not a verdict. We respond by argument, by amending claims, or both. When you receive an office action report from us, we include your actual examiner's allowance statistics — not office-wide averages — so you can see who you're dealing with before deciding how to respond.

No — "final" is one of the patent office's stranger word choices. After a final rejection you can file a Request for Continued Examination (RCE) and keep negotiating, appeal to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, or file a continuation. What "final" really means is that the free back-and-forth is over and continuing costs more. Many of our issued patents went through a "final" rejection on the way.

You can't add new matter to a pending application — what you filed is what you have. New improvements go in a new application (often a continuation-in-part) that keeps the original priority date for the original material. This is why we'd rather file complete than file fast-and-thin: the filing date only protects what the filing actually described.

A continuation is a follow-on application sharing the original's description and filing date, with different claims. It's how sophisticated patent owners keep a family alive: as competitors design around your issued claims, a pending continuation lets you write new claims aimed at what they're actually doing. If a patent matters to your business, keeping a continuation pending is often the single best strategic money you can spend.

Not forever — patents publish (see "Are patents public" above). The real choice is patent vs. trade secret: a patent protects even against independent inventors for 20 years but tells the world how it works; a trade secret can last forever (nobody outside Coca-Cola has the formula) but evaporates the moment someone reverse-engineers or independently invents it. Which is right depends on whether your invention can be figured out from the product itself.

Usually it's the plan working. Publication makes your application prior art that blocks their later filings, and it starts the clock on provisional royalty rights — infringers with notice of a published application can owe you royalties back to publication once the patent issues. If secrecy mattered more, a non-publication request at filing was the moment for it (US-only filers).

A written report from your examiner explaining what they'll allow and what they won't — objections, rejections, and the prior art they found. It is not a rejection letter in the final sense; it's the opening of a negotiation, and most applications get at least one. Responses are due within a set window (extendable for fees). When we report an office action to you, we include your specific examiner's allowance statistics along with the analysis, so you can decide how to respond knowing who you're actually dealing with.

Often fixable — don't assume it's dead. A petition to revive is available for unintentionally missed deadlines, with a fee and a filing that gets progressively harder the longer you wait. What kills applications permanently is usually not the missed date but the year that goes by before someone looks at it. If you've received an abandonment notice, that's a this-week problem.

You should — and it costs you money if you don't. Marking gives the public legal notice, and without it you generally can't recover damages for infringement occurring before you actually notified the infringer. You can mark physically or use "virtual marking": print Pat. patentlawny.com/patents (a URL) on the product and list the numbers on that page, which means no retooling every time a patent issues. Marking something "patented" that isn't is a separate offense — accuracy matters in both directions.

You pay the issue fee, receive the certificate, and start a 20-years-from-filing clock with maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years. Then the real work, which is nobody's favorite news: a patent is a right to exclude, and it excludes exactly as much as you enforce. That means marking products, watching competitors, and deciding early whether to keep a continuation pending so you can write new claims at whatever competitors actually build.

It answers the opposite question from patentability. "Can I patent this?" asks whether your invention is new. "Can I sell this?" asks whether making it infringes someone else's live patent — and the answers are independent: you can hold a patent on your product and still infringe another. An FTO study is worth its cost before a launch you can't unwind, before tooling investment, and before an acquirer's due-diligence team asks whether you ever did one.

Software is patentable and we've obtained dozens of software patents — but the reports of difficulty aren't wrong, they're just about bad software patents. Since the Supreme Court's Alice decision, claims that amount to "do this abstract idea, but on a computer" get rejected. Claims directed to a specific technical improvement — how data is processed, stored, transmitted, secured — remain patentable. The drafting makes the difference.

The look of it, sometimes (design patent); the name, that's a trademark; the code, that's copyright — but what you probably mean is the functionality, and yes, if the app does something technically new. "An app for ordering food" is not patentable; a novel method the app uses to accomplish something is. Most app patents we write are really method patents that happen to live in an app.

A bare algorithm — as mathematics — no. An algorithm applied to achieve a specific practical result, claimed as part of a system or method, frequently yes. This distinction sounds like hair-splitting and is worth real money; it's exactly the line the Alice cases draw, and where experienced drafting earns its fee.

Yes — using AI doesn't disqualify an invention any more than using a database does. The question stays the same: is your contribution new and non-obvious? An application of existing technology usually isn't patentable by itself; if it's a patentable idea, it's very likely patentable whether or not it uses AI.

Inventions must be made by humans. AI can assist you; AI cannot invent. We've had clients come to us with an invention "the AI invented" after they typed in prompts — that's not how AI works. AI is a sophisticated guesser at what comes next in a query. It's amazing — I don't even use my website's backend anymore; I tell AI what I want in plain language. In fact, I'm typing this answer into an AI prompt right now. But the inventive contribution has to be yours, and when it is, AI in the workflow is no barrier to a patent.

It's harder than it was — pure business methods ("a subscription model for X") fail the Alice test. Business methods with a concrete technical implementation still issue regularly. If the novelty is in the deal structure, think trade secret and contracts; if the novelty is in how the system actually works, come talk.

Three layers, in order of importance: (1) a written development agreement that assigns all IP to you — without one, your contractor may own the code they write for you (see "I paid a contractor" below); (2) confidentiality terms before detailed disclosure; (3) if the functionality is patentable, file before launch. The napkin-stage idea itself is protected by exactly none of the above — which is an argument for moving, not for sitting on it.

Check what you signed. Most employment agreements (especially in technical roles) assign inventions to the employer, sometimes very broadly. Without an assignment agreement, employers may still get rights if you were hired to invent, or "shop rights" if you used company time and equipment. The agreement usually decides it — read it before assuming either way.

Usually not — but "usually" is doing work in that sentence. Some agreements claim everything you invent during employment regardless of subject or location; some states limit how far such clauses can reach. Unrelated field + own time + own equipment is the strongest position. Worth a review of your specific agreement before you invest in the invention.

By default, each joint owner can independently make, sell, and license the invention without the other's permission and without sharing revenue. Most people find this shocking. If you're inventing with anyone, put ownership in an agreement (or an entity) before there's anything worth fighting over — the default rules are a mess by design.

Very possibly the contractor. Paying for work does not automatically transfer patent rights or copyright — a written assignment does. This is one of the most expensive surprises in small-business IP: companies discover at funding or acquisition that a freelancer owns their codebase. If this might be you, it's usually fixable with paper — better now than during due diligence.

In the United States, patents go to inventors by default; ownership is then transferred to a company by written assignment. If you already have a company and the patent is for the company's business, you probably want the company to own it. If you're creating an LLC just to hold the patent, that's likely a waste of money.

The honest version: there is no eBay for patents that produces good outcomes, and companies rarely buy inventions cold. What works is a patent (or credible pending application) plus evidence someone wants the product — sales, a working prototype, retailer interest. We handle the protection and the license/assignment paperwork; the door-knocking and deal-finding is business development, and anyone who says a legal filing does that part for you is selling something. See also: invention promotion companies, above.

What someone will pay for it — which sounds flip but is the actual law of the market. Drivers: whether products practicing it are selling, whether the claims are hard to design around, whether infringement is detectable, and remaining term. A patent nobody infringes and nobody needs licenses for is worth its frame. This is also why we tell some people not to file at all — see "When would you tell someone not to patent."

Commonly single digits — a few percent of the wholesale price — varying widely by industry, margin, and who bears the risk. Exclusive licenses command more than non-exclusive; a bare patent license commands less than a package with know-how. Anyone quoting you a "standard" rate before understanding the deal is guessing.

It happens less than inventors fear and more than companies admit. The safe sequence: file before you pitch (patent pending changes the conversation), pitch the problem before the secret sauce, use an NDA when the counterparty will sign one — many large companies won't, which is exactly why the filing comes first. An idea pitched with no application on file is protected mostly by the other side's manners.

You need at least a filed application. Manufacturers see everything and owe you nothing; a filing date beats any NDA they'd sign anyway. Overseas manufacturing adds the wrinkle that your US application does nothing abroad — see the international section.

A "troll" (politely, a non-practicing entity) buys patents to extract settlements rather than make products. If you get a demand letter: don't ignore it, don't panic-pay, and don't respond yourself. Many assertions are far weaker than the letter sounds — the claims may not read on your product at all, and the settlement math they're counting on changes the moment a lawyer who reads claims is in the loop. See our cease and desist guide.

Short answer: everything up to filing suit is ours; the suit itself goes to trial counsel we partner with.

Start with the fact that shapes every one of these cases — litigation is expensive, and that expense is a deterrent in both directions. It stops people from suing, and it stops people from infringing. A great many disputes resolve well short of a courtroom for exactly that reason.

When you bring us an infringement, the first thing we do is find out whether you actually have a case. We read your patent, look hard at what it claims, and build a claim chart against their product to see whether they are infringing at all. Only once that's done do we talk strategy — commonly a cease and desist letter demanding payment, and, where the infringer is selling online, takedown demands to Amazon and the other platforms.

If it does have to go to court, we hand you to one of our law firm partners who does that work. Our focus is obtaining patent, trademark, and copyright rights — and dealing with third parties when we negotiate over them.

Suing is the last tool, not the first. In practice enforcement runs: marking and monitoring → a demand or cease-and-desist letter → licensing negotiation → platform takedowns where the infringer sells online → customs recordation for imports → litigation if the money justifies it. Most disputes end in the middle of that list. What makes the early steps work is the credible possibility of the last one — which is why the strength of your claims matters even in a conversation that never sees a courtroom.

Well into six figures, frequently seven for a case that reaches trial — which is the honest reason most patent disputes settle and most small-entity patents are enforced through letters, licenses, and takedowns rather than lawsuits. It's also why we'd rather talk you out of a patent that can't be enforced than sell you one. Cease and desist letters, by contrast, are inexpensive to send and frequently produce a resolution. See our cease and desist guide.

You can, and there are two specific ways it backfires. Overstate your rights and you can trigger a declaratory judgment action — meaning they sue you, in their home court, at a time of their choosing. Understate them and you've told an infringer you're not serious while starting the clock on their "we didn't know" defense. A letter on firm letterhead that accurately describes real claims does work a template can't.

Invalidity is the standard defense to every infringement claim — expect it, don't panic at it. It can be raised in court, or through USPTO proceedings like inter partes review, where a challenger asks the patent office to reconsider based on prior art. Issued patents carry a presumption of validity, so the challenger bears the burden. This is also the retroactive argument for a thorough search before filing: claims written around known prior art survive challenges that broad, lazy claims don't.

Two things: the mark itself (for a word mark, its exact spelling; for a logo, an image plus the spelling of any text in it), and the list of goods or services it covers, sorted into classes. Details at Trademark Filing Requirements.

Potentially forever — trademarks are the only IP with no expiration date, as long as you keep using the mark and file the maintenance documents (between years 5–6, then every 10 years). Coca-Cola's registration dates to 1893. Stop using the mark, though, and the rights fade regardless of paperwork.

About a year when nothing goes wrong: an examining attorney picks it up around month 5, publication for opposition around month 7, registration around month 12. Office actions or oppositions extend that. Full walkthrough: Trademark Timeline.

Anyone can use ™ on anything they claim as a mark — it's free assertion, no filing required. ® is reserved for federally registered marks; using it without a registration is unlawful and can jeopardize your enforcement. The practical upshot: use ™ from day one, switch to ® the day your certificate arrives.

Yes — this is the single most common confusion we untangle. Registering an LLC reserves a corporate name in one state's business registry; it creates zero brand rights. Someone with a federal trademark can force your identically-named LLC to rebrand. The LLC protects your liability; the trademark protects your name.

Same answer: the domain is an address, not a right. Owning brand.com doesn't stop a competitor from registering BRAND as a trademark — after which they may have a claim against your use. If the name matters, the registration is what protects it; the domain just points at it.

If you can only do one: the word mark. It protects the name in any font, color, or design — a logo registration protects that specific design. Logos also get redesigned every few years; names tend to stay. Both is ideal; word first is the budget answer.

Yes, if it identifies you as the source rather than merely describing the product or delivering information. "Just Do It" is registered; "We Sell Quality Shoes" would go nowhere. The test is whether customers hear it as a brand.

Personal names can be registered once they function as a brand — typically requiring either acquired distinctiveness (customers know the name as a source) or use in a stylized/brand context. If the name belongs to a living person, their consent is required. Doable, with some extra steps.

Yes — Tiffany blue, the NBC chimes, and a handful of scents are registered. The bar is high: you must prove the public associates that color or sound specifically with you. Not a starting-out strategy, but it shows how far "brand" reaches.

You can and often should file before launch, on an intent-to-use basis — it locks your priority date while you build. The registration won't issue until you show actual use (sales across state lines, services rendered), and you can extend the deadline in six-month increments for up to about three years. Filing early is how you avoid discovering, post-launch, that someone filed during your build.

Oy. "Oops — I didn't respond on time and someone else filed this name. Now they've taken over my Amazon listing! What do I do?" Sigh. Another: "Ohhh, I didn't know you couldn't list things in your trademark that you aren't actually selling, and that's why I'm losing my trademark!" It goes on. Truthfully, some trademark filings are simple, and people have filed on their own with no issues. The problem is when you don't know what you don't know, make a huge mistake, and then it costs far more to fix. Hiring an attorney — one who knows what he's doing; that's not assured — to file your trademark is inexpensive insurance on a very important part of your business: your branding.

The Principal Register is the real thing — full presumptions and remedies. The Supplemental Register is the waiting room for descriptive marks that haven't yet acquired distinctiveness: you get the ® and USPTO blocking effect, but not the legal presumptions. It's sometimes the right consolation prize, and after five years of use you can often move up.

Search the USPTO's trademark database (free, public) — and also search Google, state business registries, domain names, and social handles, because unregistered users can still have superior rights from earlier use. You can also browse the 1,200+ marks we've registered to see what real registrations look like. The catch is the same as with patents: finding identical matches is easy, and the refusals that actually kill applications come from marks that merely sound or mean something similar in a related class.

It's the professional version of the search above: examiner-style review of exact and near matches, phonetic equivalents, translations, design elements, and common-law uses, with an opinion on your real registration odds. Full clearance searches are recommended, though few people actually carry them out — which is why a lot of businesses discover the problem after printing packaging. The math is straightforward: a search costs a fraction of a rebrand.

The USPTO sorts all goods and services into 45 categories, and your rights exist only in the classes you register. "Clothing" and everything within it is one class, for example. This is why Delta airlines and Delta faucets coexist — and why the government filing fee is charged per class, so covering more categories costs more. Picking classes too narrowly leaves gaps; too broadly wastes money and can invite refusals.

A specimen is your proof of actual use — a photo of the mark on the product or packaging, or a screenshot of a live sales page. It's the single most common DIY failure point, because people submit things that don't qualify: a logo file by itself, a mockup, a business card, an invoice, or a website page with no way to actually buy anything. The specimen has to show the mark being used in commerce, the way a customer would encounter it.

Usually, if you move fast. Abandonment typically follows a missed office action response, and a petition to revive is available within a limited window — after that you're refiling from scratch and losing your priority date, which matters enormously if someone filed after you. Check the date on the notice before anything else.

A state registration covers one state and is comparatively weak; federal registration covers the entire country, allows ® use, enables customs recordation and Amazon Brand Registry, and provides the presumptions that make enforcement affordable. State registration is occasionally useful for a genuinely single-state business, but for anyone selling online — which is nearly everyone — federal is the one that matters.

Yes, if it functions as a brand rather than merely an address. booking.com was registered after a Supreme Court case; a generic term plus .com isn't automatically registrable. Note the reverse trap too: owning the domain gives you no trademark rights, and registering a domain that matches someone else's mark can expose you to a cybersquatting claim.

Through a written assignment, recorded with the USPTO — and for trademarks, one crucial catch: a trademark can't be sold apart from the goodwill of the business it identifies. Bare "trademark sales" are void. We prepare and record assignments for clients regularly; recording matters because an unrecorded assignment can be defeated by a later good-faith purchaser.

Sometimes. The test is likelihood of confusion, not "is the name taken" — rights are tied to specific goods and services, which is why Delta Air Lines and Delta faucets coexist. Unrelated field: registration may be available. Close field: filing anyway can buy an expensive fight. This is exactly what a clearance search answers before you spend on branding.

You may have priority — US rights flow from first use, not first filing. Options include opposing their application (if it's still pending), petitioning to cancel (within five years of their registration, generally), or negotiating coexistence. Evidence of your earlier use is everything: dated sales, ads, web archives. Deadlines control here; move quickly.

They're scams. Burn them in the winter — use them to create some heat; that's the most useful thing you can do with them. (The USPTO corresponds through your attorney of record, and real deadlines come from us, not from a "Trademark Compliance Office" with a P.O. box.) Don't respond to the writer — unless you're one of those people who can successfully scam the scammers, in which case make a YouTube video and share it with us.

There's no percentage rule — changing one letter fixes nothing ("Nikee" shoes would last a week). The test is likelihood of confusion, weighing sight, sound, meaning, and how related the goods are. KODAK for pianos might survive; a coffee brand near-rhyming with Starbucks won't. If you're asking because you're near a famous mark, the answer is almost certainly "more different than that."

Three main ways: abandonment (stop using it — three years' nonuse creates a presumption), missed maintenance filings (the year 5–6 affidavit and 10-year renewals), and genericide — becoming the word for the thing itself, the fate of aspirin, escalator, and trampoline. That last is why Xerox ran ads begging you to say "photocopy."

After examination, marks publish for a 30-day window in which anyone claiming harm can oppose — starting a proceeding before the TTAB, a court-like process with deadlines that will not wait for you. Most oppositions settle (often with coexistence agreements). If your mark is opposed — or you need to oppose someone else's — the response clock is the thing to respect.

Often, and the venue matters more than the theory: Amazon listing hijacks are fought through Amazon's IP machinery (fast, if you're registered — see below); competitor keyword advertising is mostly legal until their ad text creates confusion; hashtags depend on whether the use implies affiliation. Registration status determines which of these levers you actually hold.

Your copyright exists automatically the moment the work is fixed — the registration (US Copyright Office, modest government fee) is what makes it enforceable. Register before infringement (or within three months of publication) and you unlock statutory damages up to $150,000 per work plus attorney's fees; register after, and you're stuck proving actual damages, which rarely pays for the lawsuit. Register anything you'd be angry to see copied.

Yes — and automatically is not the same as usefully. You can't sue without registering, and the big remedies depend on when you registered (see above). For a content-heavy site, periodic registrations of the important material are cheap insurance.

Fast lane: a DMCA takedown notice to their host — free, quick, and works on most US-hosted infringement. Real lane: register the copyright and pursue damages. The takedown removes the copy; the registration is what makes copying expensive. We routinely do both in that order.

No. Credit is not a license — attribution answers plagiarism, not copyright. Unless the image is licensed (or genuinely public domain), crediting the photographer while using their photo is just documenting your infringement politely. Stock licenses are cheap; statutory damages are not.

Employees creating within their job: you, automatically — that's work-for-hire. Freelancers: they own it unless a written agreement assigns it, no matter what you paid. Same trap as the contractor-developer question above, and the same fix: paper, ideally signed before the work, fixable after.

Purely AI-generated material — no. The Copyright Office requires human authorship, and has refused registration for images generated from prompts alone. Human selection, arrangement, and modification of AI output can be protectable as to the human contribution. Practical upshot: the more your judgment shapes the final work, the more of it you own.

There's no magic number — "under 10 seconds" and "under 300 words" are folklore. Fair use is a four-factor judgment call (purpose, nature, amount, market effect) decided after the fact, by a court, at legal-fee prices. If your business plan depends on fair use, get an opinion first; if you just want the safe answer: license it or don't use it.

For work created today by an individual: your life plus 70 years. For works made for hire (corporate authorship): 95 years from publication or 120 from creation, whichever ends first. Older works follow a genuinely confusing patchwork of prior statutes. The practical takeaway is that copyright outlives every other form of IP by a wide margin — and outlives you.

Names, titles, and short phrases — no. Copyright doesn't protect them no matter how distinctive; that's trademark's job, which is why "can I copyright my business name" is usually a trademark question wearing the wrong hat. A logo is the split case: the artwork can carry copyright and the logo can be a trademark, and for most businesses the trademark is the one worth having.

Works whose copyright has expired or was never granted — free for anyone to use, adapt, and sell. Everything published in the US before 1930 is there, growing by a year each January. Two traps: a modern edition, translation, or restoration of a public-domain work can carry its own new copyright, and a public-domain character may still be locked up as a trademark. Mickey Mouse's earliest cartoon entering the public domain didn't make the Disney logo fair game.

It's worth doing for code that matters, and there's a procedure for it: you can register while redacting trade-secret portions, so you don't have to publish your whole source to get protection. Copyright covers the expression — the actual code — while patents cover functionality and trade secrets cover what stays hidden. Serious software products often use all three, deliberately.

When the secret can actually be kept. A patent gives 20 years of protection even against independent inventors — but tells everyone how it works. A trade secret can last forever (the Coca-Cola formula has, for 130+ years) but gives no protection against reverse engineering or someone independently inventing it. Rule of thumb: if the product reveals the secret, patent it; if the value lives in a process nobody can see, secrecy may beat disclosure.

An NDA binds the people who signed it — nobody else. It gives no rights against independent inventors, no rights against the world, and its practical value is the will and money to sue a breaching party. NDAs are a layer, not a strategy: use them alongside filings, not instead of them.

Potentially a lot, and quickly — federal (Defend Trade Secrets Act) and state law allow damages and injunctions, sometimes emergency ones. Two things decide these cases: whether you actually treated the information as secret (access limits, agreements, marking), and how fast you act once you know. If this is live, it's a this-week problem, not a this-quarter one.

Through Amazon's IP-complaint machinery — which works startlingly well if you hold registered rights, and barely at all if you don't. A registered trademark plus Brand Registry gets hijacked listings and counterfeits removed in days. This is the concrete answer to "why register": on Amazon, the registration is the enforcement mechanism. See how online retailers respond.

Brand Registry is Amazon's program giving brand owners enforcement tools, listing control, and analytics — and it requires a trademark registration (pending applications qualify in some cases). For any brand selling on Amazon, this quietly makes the trademark a cost of doing business rather than a legal luxury.

Amazon's process has real appeal paths, and false or overreaching complaints are common — competitors have learned takedowns make cheap weapons. The response depends on the claim type (patent, trademark, copyright) and the facts; a well-founded attorney response gets listings reinstated, and knowingly false complaints expose the complainer to liability. Don't just resubmit the listing and hope — strikes accumulate. See Amazon and IP infringement.

Genuine goods you lawfully bought: generally yes — that's the first-sale doctrine, and it's why used bookstores exist. The gray zones: materially different goods (foreign versions, repackaged, missing warranties), quality-controlled goods, and anything implying you're an authorized dealer when you're not. Most reseller trouble lives in those three.

Honest answer: you won't stop the factory, but you can fight for the market. A US trademark recorded with Customs blocks imports at the border; Amazon/eBay/Etsy takedowns remove the listings where they actually sell; for scale problems, the ITC can issue exclusion orders. Chinese patents and trademarks are only enforceable if you filed in China — which, if manufacturing there, you should consider before the copying starts, not after.

No — patents are territorial. A US patent stops US infringement, including imports into the US, but grants nothing abroad. The standard path outward is a PCT international application within 12 months of your US filing, preserving your date in 150+ countries while you decide (up to ~30 months) where national filings are worth the cost. We've obtained 139+ foreign patents for clients this way.

By not filing everywhere. The PCT buys you 30 months of decision time for one fee; the money is in the national filings that follow (translations are the silent killer). The discipline: file where you'll manufacture, where your real markets are, and where enforcement is realistic — for most clients that's a shortlist of 2–5 countries, not 20.

Through the Madrid Protocol, one application built on your US filing extends to 100+ countries — we file these directly. The EU is a single filing covering all member states (and includes multiple classes in the base fee, unlike the US per-class structure). Strategy: register where you sell, where you manufacture, and where you're likely to be counterfeited — in that order of urgency.

Both passed the USPTO's patent bar (which requires a science or engineering background) and can prosecute patent applications. A patent attorney is also a licensed lawyer — able to handle trademarks, contracts, licensing, opinions, and disputes, which is most of what surrounds a patent in real life. Both of our attorneys are registered patent attorneys: Michael J. Feigin (Reg. No. 59,013) and Lawrence G. Fridman (Reg. No. 33,615).

Because the USPTO requires one even to sit for the patent bar — the examiners are engineers and scientists, and the job is translating technology into law. It's a small profession for this reason; your general practice lawyer, however good, cannot legally prosecute your patent.

You're going to work with this person for a while. Make sure you can talk to them, make sure they're responsive, and make sure they can explain what's going on. Also — make sure they know what they're doing. Our work and explanations are all on this website for you to review before calling: 1,300+ issued patents, 1,200+ trademarks, samples with commentary. Then call and see that we answer the phone, or call you back quickly. (Sometimes we're on the phone with someone else — or, you know, out for a bit on vacation and answering calls once a day.)

Yes — we do this all the time. Problems are usually fixable, though the effort and cost required varies greatly. The one thing that makes everything worse is waiting: deadlines that lapse while you're deciding may close doors that were open. Bring what you have, we'll tell you honestly which kind of problem it is.

No. Never.

Any licensed lawyer may handle trademarks; only a USPTO-registered patent attorney (with the required technical degree and patent bar exam) may prosecute patents. So every patent attorney can do trademarks, but most trademark attorneys cannot do patents. Both of our attorneys are registered for both — which matters when a single product needs a patent on the mechanism and a trademark on the name, and you'd rather not manage two firms.

Investors run IP diligence, and the two things that reliably blow up deals aren't missing patents — they're missing paperwork: founders who never assigned their inventions to the company, and contractors who still own the code they wrote. Fix those first; they're cheap now and deal-threatening later. Then the trademark on your name (rebranding post-launch is brutal), then patent filings on anything core before you disclose it in a pitch deck.

Book a consultation — a half-hour video call, $250, fully credited toward your project. Bring whatever exists: sketches, a description, the name you're considering. You'll speak with an attorney, get a straight answer about whether what you have is protectable, and leave knowing what it would cost. If we don't think you should file, we'll tell you that too. New clients can also review what to expect before booking.

Electronically — USPTO declarations are signed through our secure client signing pages with an S-signature (typing /your name/), and you receive the signed PDF by email immediately. No printer required at any step.