The Patent Pro Bono Program attempts to match inventors with registered patent agents or patent attorneys. These practitioners volunteer their time without charging the inventor. However, the inventor still must pay all fees that are required by the USPTO; these cannot be paid by the practitioner.
In fact, federal law requires patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to help individual inventors who apply for patents without a lawyer's help. To obtain a patent, you must first ensure that your invention actually qualifies for a patent and second, fill out the patent application.
A patent attorney will usually charge between $8,000 and $10,000 for a patent application, but the cost can be higher. In most cases, you should budget between $15,000 and $20,000 to complete the patenting process for your invention.
A poor man's patent is essentially writing out a description of your invention and then mailing that written description to yourself. This postmarked envelope supposedly acts to create the date of your invention as the date this written description was postmarked.
Legally speaking, nothing prevents an inventor from preparing a patent application (or provisional patent application) without a lawyer. Indeed, thousands of inventors regularly do so, using self-help guides such as Nolo's Patent It Yourself, Patent Pending in 24 Hours or Online Provisional Patent Application process.
You can file the patent application without help from patent professional, in that case it is advisable that you should at least get your patent application reviewed by an experienced patent agent or attorney before filing into the patent office.
What kind of patent do you need?There are three types of patents - Utility, Design, and Plant.Utility Patent.Design Patent.Plant Patent.
The primary benefit of a patent is the right to stop your competitors from selling the same product. You can become the sole supplier of the product. Based on the law of supply and demand, lowering the supply allows you to sell your product at a higher price. If sales are strong, then the patent is absolutely worth it.
In the United States, it takes an average of 23.3 months from the filing of a patent application to get a patent.
Even under the old system, i.e., the “first to invent” system, a “poor man's patent” standing alone, i.e, without a patent application, was worthless. You cannot access the court system and ask a judge or a jury to enforce a right that the U.S. Government does not even recognize as a right.
If easy means getting a patent without any rejections, then only 11% of utility nonprovisional patent applications get allowed without any rejections according to this Yale statistical study. So getting a utility patent will not be easy in most cases.
20 years(Utility patents, the most common type of patent, are issued for useful inventions that are novel). For utility patents filed on or after June 8, 1995, the patent term is 20 years from the date of filing. For design patents, the period is 14 years from date of issuance.