Have you ever come up with a great new product idea and think this is going to make you millions of dollars? Now, after spending thousands of dollars and many months to figure out how to make lots of them, your product takes off and you have made it. Life is grand as you are making tons of money, then suddenly, 9 months into the great success you are having, you see on Amazon a knockoff of your product for half the sale price as yours. 

 

This example happens to a lot of great people and businesses that work long and hard to develop innovative products to make detailers more efficient. For this reason, protecting your hard work with patents can protect yourself. According to Dictionary.com, the definition of a patent is “the exclusive right granted by a government to an inventor to manufacture, use, or sell an invention for a certain number of years.” By receiving a patent, it allows one to protect your intellectual property from competitors as well as receive damages from the companies that copy the product. Let’s now discuss the types of patents you can get and what is involved in getting them.

 

There are two types of patents you can apply for: Design and Utility. Copyright is for written documents and software.  We will be discussing only patents in this article.

 

A design patent is to protect from copying the unique design of the product. An example would be the iPhone.  Have you noticed that other cell phones don’t look like the iPhone? That is because they have a design patent on them. A design patent provides protection for 15 years from the day you are granted it. Of the two types of patents, it is the easier of the two to obtain. The process takes between 6 months to a year to obtain a design patent from the date you file with the patent office. The benefit is that the unique product design that results in advantages over competitive products will be protected. The disadvantage is if there are slight modifications that are noticeable compared to what you have protected, a customer can get around your design patent. The cost to do a design patent varies if you decide to work with an attorney or not and what level of experience you have creating CAD drawings which the patent office uses to determine the approval of the patents. The typical cost is between five and fifteen thousand.

 

A utility patent is to protect a process of making something or how something is made or used that is unique. An example of a utility patent is Lake Country CCS foam pads. There is a unique process to create the dimples that are made in the foam pad. This protects Lake Country from competitors creating a pad using our process no matter the shape or size of the product from using that process.  A utility patent protects for 20 years from the filing date of the application. Currently, (USA only) it takes anywhere from 1.5-3.5 years to obtain your patent. Utility protection is difficult to achieve, it can be very challenging to get all the items or features protected one desires, so going back and forth with the patent office can take significant time and cost. Cost can range on a utility patent. On the low end, it can be tens of thousands of dollars and on the high end, it can easily cost well over a hundred thousand dollars.

What has been discussed so far applies only to the USA. If one sells into other countries or plans on selling in other countries in the future, this process needs to be accomplished in each country. Also, the costs listed above are only to achieve the patent, it doesn’t include the cost if someone does infringe on the patent. Depending on how popular the patented item is, there may be lots of companies copying it. One then has the right to protect the patent and that can be very costly as well.