Patent attorneys talk a lot about protecting your brand and your innovation, but what about protecting the entirety of your business? The conception of innovation protection with a registered patent is widely known and practiced. Patent attorneys are highly skilled at what they do and how they protect the world’s leading innovation, but it’s not just the innovation itself that we should be striving to protect… Enter “Revenue Patents.”
Traditional Patent Applications
The importance of patents and patent protection is known but it is also said that the majority of patents are worthless. Not because they do not hold value, but because generally, companies fail to understand that just getting a patent, while it’s a powerful tool, is not enough. The patent must tie into a revenue generating aspect of the business.
Most patent attorneys will ask you for your idea, you’ll disclose it to them, and they’ll write you an application that protects your idea. The focus is on the invention alone. Unfortunately, they never once ask you, “how do you plan to make money from this” or “what are the different ways that we can ensure that your claims, as well as the write-up of the patent, protect your revenue stream.” This is the secret sauce here at Dana Legal Services.
What are Revenue Patents?
A revenue patent is a patent application that protects your idea, as well as your revenue stream. How is this done? The entirety of your business model is taken into consideration to ensure each facet is protected. Let’s explain this further. When you go on to write a non provisional patent application, more on that topic here, most attorneys are going to focus on your invention and craft your claims around that. What a revenue patent does is focus on not just the product but your entire business model within your claims and disclosure.
When an attorney looks at the revenue stream, they begin to understand the perspective from which the client is planning to make money. Some clients want to have a manufacturer make something for them, and sell it on their behalf. Other clients want to have three different manufacturers, each making a piece of the puzzle, and shipping it back to them for assembly. Others have various ways of doing x, y, and z with one of them considered the best way, which is the one that they claim. Revenue patents take into consideration the ways in which you’re going to make money so that the claims are written not just to protect your idea, but to also protect the point of view from which the revenue is made. In other words, it’s a different type of claim set that talks about giving rights to a manufacturer to make everything and sell it on your behalf. Versus a claim that says, I talked about three different manufacturers, each making a piece of the puzzle and giving it back to the client.
The last piece of the puzzle is to include in the disclosure, a written description of the various ways that the client is thinking about development, even though there may only be one way they intend to make it, all three different ways are written up so that someone down the road can’t use one of the client’s alternative methods and go claim it based on their discovery and development. Therefore, using that as a way of selling or attacking the client’s revenue stream.
Once an inventor discloses something in a patent application and the patent application becomes published, it becomes a reference that can be used to prevent other people from getting a patent, because it has been disclosed. The more someone discloses in the context of their revenue stream to their patent attorney, the better their invention protection will be because it’s closely tied to their revenue stream. That’s what revenue patents do and how they help protect the entirety of your business.
How Can Dana Legal Services Help?
You don’t have to navigate the complex world of intellectual property on your own. When you have a dream in the form of a new idea, you need to protect it with the backing of a skilled patient law attorney. That’s where we come in. If you have any questions or wish for professional assistance in drafting and filing a patent application that is focused on your revenue stream, we would be happy to discuss how we can help you.
Our team at Dana Legal Services has decades of experience in the field. Do reach out to us at info@danalegalservices.com, or alternatively, drop your question on our website at www.danalegalservices.com/contact/. Not ready for questions but want to learn more, head to our YouTube channel! Here is our webinar on connecting your patent application to your revenue stream.
If you are still not ready to hire a patent attorney but want to learn more about filing your own patent application head to our blog, “How to File a Nonprovisional Patent Application”. Not sure if a provisional application or a non provisional is best for you we lay out the differences here, “Provisional vs Nonprovisional Patent Application“.