What is a patent?

- What is a patent? A patent is a type of intellectual property that traditionally covers utilitarian innovations and processes. Early patents were often for machines that fueled the Industrial Revolution, including harvesting technology or products that improve life, like the foldable umbrella. Patents were used to protect inventions and printing technologies. Nowadays, patents are actually used to cover pharmaceuticals, software, methods of doing things, processes, and a variety of consumer products. Patents cover a wide array of innovations. In order to be entitled to a patent, the thing you want to patent has to qualify for protection. Well, what does it mean to be patentable? It means that it has to be something that has never been done before. We call this novelty. Patents have to be novel. Otherwise, why should we protect them? Why should we give you any special rights if it's already been done? We want to incentivize people to develop completely new ideas. So patentability requires novelty. It also requires utility. It needs to do something, and you need to be able to describe how to do that thing. It also has to be not obvious. This is a little bit like novelty. It needs to be not something that people who are skilled in the art would believe is obvious for them to do or to try. Novelty, utility, non-obviousness. These are the three key qualifications when we evaluate patentability. And there's one more piece to the patent puzzle. The invention must not be subject to what we call a statutory bar. Typically, this means that it isn't something that you as the inventor have already publicly displayed or published and made known to people in the past. This is tricky, because it means many inventors effectively bar themselves from getting a patent because they've shared the details of their innovation before filing a patent.