Is Patenting Important After All?

What is Patents? Is it important?

Intellectual Property (IP) are intangible assets that one owns, they are the creation of mind from disruptive inventions to artistic work and brand names. In order to protect those assets, we use intellectual property rights or IPR.

Patents are one of the several IPRs, it can protect inventions, whether it is a product or a method for producing certain products. It grants protection up to 20 years and covers how things function, what they do and how are they made.

To Patent or not To Patent

There are certain conditions that help you know if your idea is eligible or not

• It must have a practical use.
• Novelty element: it must contain a something new that did not exist before.
• You must show an inventive step, it must contain something that people with average knowledge can’t reach.
• Need to make sure that it is Patentable by the law.

But Is this criterion all you need?

Of course, not. You need to do further patent research or “Prior Art Research” on your idea before you patent it and check whether it was previously patented or not. If it was previously patent that means you can’t patent your idea.

However, this is not the end of the world, because this research will serve as market research as well, and will give you an overview of the market trends.

In sum, after checking your idea’s eligibility, you need to do you prior art research in order to make sure that your idea is patentable and is targeted to the right customer and help in solving an occurring problem in the society aka you need to know is it worth it, after all, to patent your idea or not.