Reddit mentions of Patent It Yourself: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Filing at the U.S. Patent Office

>Being your typical poor college student, what kind of time frame am I looking at for a deadline?

Starting March 16, 2013, the USA patent system switched to first to file. Your deadline is immediately.

File a provisional Patent. It costs $130 and you don't need a lawyer. Patent fee schedule. IIRC, you are a micro entity so you don't need the additional fee (which is for larger organizations of people that file multiple times). Hand sketches are totally acceptable for this sort of thing.

No one reviews it and nothing really happens - its up to you to seek out prior art. When you reach the utility stage, then you'll have an inspector scrutinize your claims.

Once you've filed your provisional, you have 1 year to file for your utility. If you fail to do so, the technology becomes public domain. When filing for your utility, you can only claim what was in your provisional - to add more, you need to seek out professional advice/services.

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Does your university take claim to anything you invent? This is the case in a lot of places (perhaps less so for undergraduate).

Finally, I recommend "Patent it Yourself" and then recommend that you do not patent it yourself (everything after the provisional).

> Small inventors cannot afford the process of getting a patent.
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That is incorrect. You can get a patent for a few thousand dollars is you do your homework. There are books about how to do this, and the cost is really not that high if you can avoid legal fees.

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> Small inventors cannot afford the process of defending a patent in court.

That is correct. Big companies can still bully the small inventor because a typical patent lawsuit will cost millions of dollars.

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Just to be clear: I'm not trying to defend the US patent system, I'm just stating what I know about it based upon discussions with patent officers many years ago. At that time I was complaining about trivial patents -- that conversation I can probably dig up because if I search around because it was had on the Usenix group sci.crypt (EDIT: Found some of it here ). The US patent system has problems -- but fixing it in a fair way is not such a trivial task. I think it is naive to say no to all software patents.

Let me give an example. Whether software should be patentable has been questionable since the early days of software. One of the major examples of a patent that seemed to pave the way for allowing software patents is the RSA cryptosystem patent. In this patent, they described it as a (hardware) "device", to make it look not so different from other patents that people envision when they think of inventions. But then they put in the text to also allow it to work on a general purpose computer: "In alternative configurations, the transformation of the message M to the ciphertext C may be accomplished using a programmed digital computer rather than the hardware elements illustrated in FIG. 3."

From this way of thinking about it, it is pretty hard for me to understand how somebody can say "no" to software patents but allow other types of patents. What is the difference between building special purpose hardware to solve a problem versus having a general purpose computer solve the same problem? If we allow hardware devices to be patented but not allow software, then anyone can build software that solves the same problem as the special purpose hardware, which will essentially kill the benefit of patenting hardware. It just doesn't make sense -- the whole purpose of a patent is to protect your IP, but prohibiting software patents would make hardware IP no longer protected.

So, I fully think software patents should be allowed. They just need a better way to rule out the trivial and not-inventive stuff, because right now the real problem is too much junk getting through.

It isn't always a bad thing to wait that long. You get to use the "Patent Pending" term on your product which by itself will help deter people from copying it.

You can file a provisional patent application (PPA) for less money and have a year to test commercial viability of the product. Then once you choose to move forward it will take a year or two generally.

Again the long wait can be a good thing, even if you end up getting denied by the patent office for some reason. You still get to use all that time to develop market share and use the "Patent Pending" term on all your products.

I'm not recommending it but I've heard of people actually filing patents they know will be denied just so they can legally use the term.

To address your other question about the specifics about filing a patent I suggest buying and reading Nolo's Patent it Yourself Guide. It's very very good information. You definitely don't have to try and write a patent yourself but taking 4-6 hours of reading this guide will tell you if your idea is patentable, describe the application process, and all the terminology. Most importantly it helped me have a knowledgeable conversation with my patent lawyer.

As far as my personal story, I reached out to an old professor asking him for patent lawyer recommendations. He put me in touch with an older lawyer who worked for himself, not a firm. That helped keep the price more reasonable, about $5-6k all said and done.

Got a spare $30 - buy this book - it has everything you need to know to draft and file your own patent for any of these basic ideas. All you need to do is describe your idea in enough detail so someone could build it. Most ideas are patentable if they could be implemented on a computer (list the steps) and achieve a practical result. Filing a patent costs $400 if you earn less than $150k per year otherwise it costs $800 for a company of up to 500 people. You will need to pay $445 if the patent is granted, but a granted patent can be quite valuable.

This book, Patent it Yourself, is a bible for these kinds of questions.

And, if you're a cheap ass like me, you can just use the "Look Inside" feature to flip to a certain page that answers your specific question. Seriously though, the book gets incredible reviews and is the default source for self-patenters with no background.

Read this: Patent It Yourself: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Filing at the U.S. Patent Office.

If your patent is going to be worth anything significant, the cost of a patent lawyer is peanuts.

If you want cheap, read Patent It Yourself so you can control price AND quality!

That book is extremely well written.