Ten Facts About Patents

MARK TERRY, ESQ.

Patents give their owners the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, or importing a claimed invention. They may protect products, machines, compositions, and innovative processes that provide new solutions to technical problems.

Patent history contains many unusual examples. A teenage inventor reportedly sold rights connected to a ratchet to Sears for a relatively small payment before the product generated far greater commercial returns. The original patent records for the fire hydrant are also said to have been lost in a fire.

Not every valuable product is patented. WD-40 is commonly cited as a product protected through trade-secret practices rather than a disclosed patent. This illustrates the strategic choice between patent protection, which requires public disclosure, and secrecy, which can potentially last as long as the information remains confidential.

Jonas Salk did not patent the polio vaccine, and the early developers of insulin similarly prioritized public access over exclusive patent rights. Benjamin Franklin also declined to patent his inventions, expressing the view that inventions should sometimes be shared freely for public benefit.

Other examples include France’s decision to make early photography technology broadly available while treating Britain differently, an unsuccessful effort associated with patenting a form of patent-trolling strategy, Amazon’s well-known one-click purchasing patent, and patents involving semiconductor-based vision technologies.

These examples show that intellectual-property strategy is not one-size-fits-all. Inventors should evaluate patentability, commercial objectives, disclosure risks, potential licensing value, and alternative protection such as trade secrets before deciding how to protect an innovation.