A patent gives you certain legal rights, which can deter rival businesses from using or copying your products or inventions.
Whether you are a private inventor working from your home, a full-time entrepreneur, or a principal in a large corporate entity developing or refining products or the means of producing them, protecting innovation is an integral part of modern enterprise.
In the most recent years for which it provides statistics, the UK Patent Office granted 7,555 (2001) and 8,690 (2002) patents. At any given time almost 300,000 patents are in effect in the U.K., having been granted either by our own Patent Office, or by the European Patent Office in Munich. Approximately two-thirds of the patents in force in the U.K. today belong to British businesses or inventors.
In order to be patentable, an invention must therefore be new; in other words, it must not have been made public before your patent application is filed. It must “involve an inventive step” which means it cannot be obvious in the light of what is already known. It must be capable of industrial application.
Patents protect ideas. They are intended to provide protection for the concept behind products or processes that have new technical or functional features. These features could be for example, a new construction of a product, how it works, or how the product is made.
At Howard Lock Intellectual Property we guide our clients through every step of the patent application process from drafting the patent specification, to filing the application with the Intellectual Property office. Call us today on 0114 218 0653 and see how we can help to protect your business ideas.