

"Poor Man's Patent" or Minimum needed to apply for a U.S. Patent? - WhenIAmAtWork

My friend has a good idea for a hardware thingy.<p>An example, not his real idea, is below:<p>"A device that hooks onto a ladder so you can add a second ladder easily and safely."<p>I told him he should make it and then apply for a patent and he said he already emailed himself the idea which he calls 'the Poor Man's Patent' and that he is covered. I told him that as far as I know it doesn't count. He has no drawings or diagrams or even a journal showing any work on it. He said that he believes that the idea itself is patentable and his email covers that. I said it is not and it is the finished fully described and replicable device that is patentable -- that ideas themselves aren't patentable. I then told him that since I made no verbal contract to not pursue his idea and that since I did not sign a NDA that in a few months if I applied for a patent and I have the schematics and diagrams and my notebooks showing all the things I tried and what worked and didn't then he'd be out of luck.<p>That it isn't the idea:<p>"A device to make time travel possible"<p>that gets a patent but an actual, working device:<p>"A device to make time travel possible" Along with the schematics to make the device and such.<p>Which one of us is right?
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vitovito
Your friend is describing "poor man's copyright" or an "inventor's notebook,"
except done incorrectly.

First, "poor man's copyright" is the wrongly-held belief that you can mail
yourself something, and the official postal service postmark will be proof
enough that you wrote it when you said you did. This is not true, and will not
hold up in a court of law. A much more easily forgeable email would hold up
even less than not-at-all.

Second, a patent, by definition, is a set of protections conferred _in
exchange for public disclosure._ An actual patent requires enough detail that
someone with a general understanding of whatever domain the patent is under
could build your device, replicate your process, etc.

In fact, publicly publishing not only the idea, but also the implementation,
is the only defense against someone else filing a patent for it, as that
establishes prior art. For paper publication, that means notarized copies of
your "inventor's notebook:"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook>

You can also file for a patent and then abandon your application.

Online publication is dicier unless you can get external proof that your
publication dates are what you said they were (archive.org records, perhaps?
other blogs citing you?).

Because the US is the only(?) "first to invent" country (everyone else is
first-to-file), you can more easily contest a patent by demonstrating that you
were actively reducing it to practice (that replicable amount of detail again)
before the filer was. Otherwise, you'd have to demonstrate that it was
unpatentable instead:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inve...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_invent)

