Part 5: How A Product Claim Can Protect Your Product
This is the fifth post in the How to Patent an Idea: A Guide for Beginners series. You can listen to this blog below: If you read part two in the series on understanding patents, then you know that only the claim section of issued patents can be used to sue for patent infringement. If you read the third post, How To Protect Your Idea, then you have a few tips for reading patent claims. Will My Patent Claims Protect My Product? There is no definitive way to guarantee that your claims draft will protect your innovation, especially given the constant evolution of patent law that can change the way claims are interpreted by the courts. To give you an example - the claims that you file in a patent application can be thought of as a starting point for negotiations with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As part of this negotiation the USPTO may require that claims be amended in a way that reduces the coverage of the original claims. Additionally, product claims are usually considered much stronger than process claims. One reason is that an infringing product is easier to detect when a competitor imports…