Rich Goldstein (00:04):
I already know that to patent something. It needs to be different, but how different does it have to be in order to qualify for a patent? So in this video, we’re going to talk about the basic criteria for patentability at the United States patent office. So under the patent law, there are two different requirements for, um, how distinctive or different something needs to be. So first the invention must be novel. In other words, they can’t be anything exactly like it in the prior art. Um, and the second invention has to be non-obvious. The second one is a little more challenging. It means that the difference between your invention and what other people have done before, um, the thing that makes your invention unique, it can’t be something that would be obvious to someone in the field. It has to be something that’s a little bit more unexpected, a little bit at more outside of the range of what people people would think to do.
Rich Goldstein (01:01):
So that means that even if your invention is novel and there’s nothing exactly like it, there also must be a difference about it, which someone in the field couldn’t just say, yeah, that’s something I knew I could do. I just haven’t done it yet. Uh, for example, if your idea is to make clothes hangers in small sizes for children’s clothes, it may be that your invention is novel and that no one has ever made a clothes hanger in that exact size. What is the type of thing that people in the field of manufacturing, clothes, hangers, they know that they can do this. They know that they could have a hanger in any size and they simply choose a particular size just because it happens to fit most clothes. So they’ve standardized the size. And so basically the idea of changing the size of an existing invention is something that would be obvious and therefore not patentable.
Rich Goldstein (01:51):
And there can be some confusion as to what modifications would be obvious and which ones are not obvious and people can and do different opinion on this one too frequently. This is where patentability gets confusing for the untrained eye. And usually, um, you know, this is where I get involved to give some guidance as to what the patent examiner may or may not allow as being non-obvious. Uh, so in order to see whether your idea has a chance of being patented, the first thing you need to know is what are the closest things in the field of the invention. Then you can start to determine whether, um, it’s different enough, whether you’ve made a non-obvious improvement over things that already exist in the next video. I’m going to talk about how we determine the closest prior art to your invention.
