Prior art is any evidence that your invention was already known to the public before your filing date. Under 35 U.S.C. 102, that means anything patented, described in a printed publication, in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public anywhere in the...
A patent application has five parts, and only one of them defines what the patent covers: the claims. The abstract does not. The title does not. The drawings do not. Under federal regulation the abstract cannot even be used to interpret claim scope, and it is capped...
Google Patents indexes more than 120 million patent documents from over 100 patent offices, and it costs nothing to use. A competent search on it takes six to ten hours and runs in four passes: keywords, classification codes, citation chains, and assignee sweeps. The...
A utility patent lasts 20 years from its earliest non-provisional filing date, and a design patent lasts 15 years from issuance. Getting one takes 24 to 42 months from filing to issuance on a standard track, or under 12 months with Track One prioritized examination....
A 2024 USPTO data review put the average cost of contesting a stolen invention claim in U.S. district court above $750,000 in legal fees, and most of those cases never recover the inventor’s losses. The cheaper path, by far, is putting protections in place...
About 9 in 10 unsolicited invention submissions get rejected before a single engineer reads them, and most of the rejected pile never had a chance because the inventor sent the wrong package to the wrong person on the wrong day. This guide explains how the submission...
A consumer products company in the upper Midwest received 1,847 unsolicited invention submissions in 2025. They reviewed 1,847 of them. They progressed 41 to a second round. They signed 4. That hit rate (about 0.2 percent) holds across most companies that publish a...
A category buyer at a top-five US mass retailer reviews 1,200 to 1,800 new products a year and selects 40 to 80 for testing. That ratio (about 3 to 5 percent acceptance) sets the bar for any inventor whose product reaches a retail buyer meeting. The inventors who get...
A licensing scout in the housewares category confirmed last month what experienced product development firms have long known: she can name the inventor on three of every twelve pitches she reviews. The other nine arrive as faceless products from anonymous senders. The...
Industry licensing scouts at the major housewares trade shows now schedule pitch reviews in 8-minute windows. Eight minutes per inventor, 50 inventor meetings across two days, then a 30-day decision window after the show. Inside that 8 minutes, the buyer has to absorb...
