Autofill Legal Vermont Patents Forms For Free

The cheapest way to get "Patent Pending" status is to file a provisional patent application. All that is required is a detailed description of the invention, an informal drawing, and a synopsis of how you came up with the idea. For small entities, the application fee is $130 and for large companies it is $260.

Look for a patent number on the product or packaging. Many companies print patent document numbers on their products as public notification of their patent rights. Use the patent number to search and retrieve a copy of the patent from a patent database. Identify the company that makes (or made) the product.

This rumor gets passed around a lot, but it's sadly false. United States copyright law offers no official protection for a poor man's copyright. While you might be able to prove that you created it first, you need to be the first to file in order to get full protection.

The Patent Pro Bono Program attempts to match inventors with registered patent agents or patent attorneys. These practitioners volunteer their time without charging the inventor. However, the inventor still must pay all fees that are required by the USPTO; these cannot be paid by the practitioner.

Free Patent Search Online The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office provides free patent searching of its public databases. Google Patents. A relatively easy database to search which PDF images available. Limited to U.S. patents and U.S. published applications.

A poor man's patent is essentially writing out a description of your invention and then mailing that written description to yourself. This postmarked envelope supposedly acts to create the date of your invention as the date this written description was postmarked.