I'm an indie inventor and I got my first software patent (US) this summer, today I filed my second. AMA
obviously none of this is legal advice nor should it be taken as such. I learned a lot from the last 2 years of going through this process of getting a patent in software. If you're thinking about going for a patent and have some questions I will try to answer them.
Some general things I learned which I didnt hear:
- I probably didnt need it
- File a provisional patent first, this protects you for a year, you can have written for just $500 (or do yourself and file for $65)
- no one will want to license anything from you unless you have traction with your invention.
- If you have traction with your invention you probably dont want to license it.
Congrats !
Congrats on becoming an inventor! A couple of questions for you... What are some good resources to learn about software patents? It seems like it is hard to get patents in software now, what makes a particular software patentable?
Good question, thanks for actually responding. A software patent isnt fundamentally different from any other. And there isnt any special patent for software, its just a USPTO Patent.
I liked this:
https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/news-updates/examination-software-patents
I've also found upcounsel helpful, but they tend to recommend things that will get the lawyers who advertise on their site paid the most. https://www.upcounsel.com/software-patent-examples
In terms of software patents its important to think in processes. You can patent a novel step in a process or system, but you can't patent what a system does overall. You couldn't patent an algorithm, like an array sorting algorithm (random example, just thinking of something baseline). Anyone can sort an array. But you could come up with a new step that isnt obvious and is special you could have luck patenting the process of doing that step. Hope this is at least a little helpful while you try to understand more. Not legal advice.
You can patent software that is used for licensing. Like a weather API.
You can;t really patent an API... API is just sending data between two places, and you cant patent any kind of data.
Hey Joseph, I hope you don't mind me asking some more questions. How much did you spend total on getting your patent? How many hours did you spend working on it? How many revisions/appeals were required? If you don't think you needed the first one, what made you decide to file another one? Did you get traction before deciding to file the patent application?
A note for others, I found Coursera has a course on patents and IP.
Thanks,
James
Thanks for the question James, I just followed you on twitter. follow me back if you want to take this to DMs, I'm really happy to talk about this and I'm working on some edu materials for inventors who are where I was a few years ago and maybe a web product that I wouldnt mind your feedback on either if you're interested.
Total spent $12,000
Provisional patent, about 20 hours including making diagrams. Although I wish I got help with diagrams and spent less time on that. I'm really not a graphics kind of person
Non-provisional patent I didnt spend as much time working on but that's where the $12k comes in and I spent a lot of time working to earn that.
The first felt like I needed it at the time because I was getting not great advice from investors and money people that aren't necessarily product people or the right source of advice. The second one is something I'm just way more excited about and relevant to a larger industry.